Past Backups - is cleanup of old clients necessary?

[derek500]

Do we have to manually clean up the Past Backups page?

 

In the Past Backups window I have a few clients listed that I stopped backing up months ago. (new computer/employee left/etc) I have removed the source. At what point does that old backup get groomed from the Disk media set? Isn't removing the Source enough to groom the past backup? (apparantly not?) Do I need to manually choose "Remove" from the Past Backups listing? I understand that as long as non-groomable media survives those backups will and should be listed. But for my Disk media set, I expected these forgotten sources to groom unless I specifically select "Lock from grooming" from the Options tab.

 

I guess more specifically, my question is what happens to client data after you have removed the source?

[CallMeDave]

I guess more specifically, my question is what happens to client data after you have removed the source?

 

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess it remains on the Media unless/until you Recycle it.

 

Just because you decide to stop actively backing up a particular Source shouldn't (and doesn't) direct Retrospect to delete the files it already has for that Source.

[Maser]

Old backups do not get removed from a media set unless you groom them out.

 

If you don't have grooming turned on for the set, then you could turn it on and set it to a fairly high number (like 150, maybe? -- it would depend on how old the media set is) and once the catalog has updated itself after making that change (which can take a while), you'll see the clients backups in Past Backups (or at least 150 of them...)

 

You can then manually remove all the clients past backups -- again, this can take a *long time* to process -- and then run a groom on the media set (which, again, takes a long time to do -- depending on the size of the media set. However, if you have more than 150 backups of all your clients, you don't want to do that groom -- as it'll only keep 150 backups of *all* the clients.

 

 

However, I would suggest you avoid grooming *individual* Past backups -- that can take a long time to do to get them all, but it depends on how many backups you have and (again) the number of files/size of the media set... But, that *would be* the safest way to groom out Past Backups -- to do them one at a time. But it'll be the longest way to do them.

 

 

It all depends on your retention policy. I keep a "60 backup" backup of my client machines and my groom settings reflect that and I groom a media set a week.

 

When I remove a client, I set aside an evening to grab the remaining 60 visible backups of the removed client and manually delete those past backups. When the next scheduled groom of that media set takes place, then all that clients files will be deleted at that point.

[derek500]

Thanks for the replies. We have a "5 backup" retention policy and groom once a week. We are only keeping disaster recovery backups, not a computing history for each client!

 

It makes sense how you describe it, that I should manually select the old clients to delete. I will just have to remember to stay on top of this. I was thinking I should wipe and start over my main backup disk annually or so to prevent fragmentation of that groomed volume, and that would also get rid of the old clients, but I can wait until I see a performance hit. I'm curious how long it will take. I have a 6TB RAID and only 2.5 TB in use at this time, so I expect it will be a while before I see any performance issues.

[ferthalangur]

Thanks for the replies. We have a "5 backup" retention policy and groom once a week. We are only keeping disaster recovery backups, not a computing history for each client!

 

It makes sense how you describe it, that I should manually select the old clients to delete. I will just have to remember to stay on top of this. I was thinking I should wipe and start over my main backup disk annually or so to prevent fragmentation of that groomed volume, and that would also get rid of the old clients, but I can wait until I see a performance hit. I'm curious how long it will take. I have a 6TB RAID and only 2.5 TB in use at this time, so I expect it will be a while before I see any performance issues.

 

Hi Derek,

 

We also use Retrospect for disaster recovery and don't want to keep things in perpetuity.

I have my "groom to" setting set to 5

 

FWIW: My strategy has been to use two separate disk media sets, and back up to alternate

media sets every day, Monday through Saturday. On Sunday, I run a groom script. Every

month or three, I recycle one of the media sets to start fresh.

 

The two disk media set strategy gives me a warmer fuzzier feeling that if (when) I have a hardware

failure on one of my backup disks, or if Retro. goes crazy and corrupts my media set, I only lose one

day of backups.

 

Now that I think about it -- I have all my catalogs on the same disk on the server, and that's

a SPOF. I realize that I can rebuild a catalog from the media set, but that takes a long long time.