carpeperdiem Posted June 19, 2012 Report Share Posted June 19, 2012 Dear Retro community, I played with the V9 demo now for an hour or so... OK, the geeks have taken over the world. And how UN-mac-like has the interface turned into? Standard UI functions all missing -- but forget all that/ let's talk WORKFLOW for an upgrader. LET'S SAY that my storage sets/archives/media set are all FILES. My work is project based-- so the XYZ project has its own master folder. This XYZ folder changes constantly. The XYZ folder can become 100gigs or more. At some point, the project is put to bed and there is a slim to none chance of additional data ever being added to it. Until XYZ project manager decides to resurrect a project element 6 years from now. Happens all the time! So I have a 92gb file (two, actually -- set A and set B, on different drives) for the XYZ project. This was created in Retro V6. Let's say XYZ's project manager called me today and asked me to go back into the project, restore one element and make a change. Workflow (please correct me if there is a better way): 1. Media Sets > Rebuild (find V6 storage set). Retro V9 makes a new file in V9 format. 2. Restore (search for files) -- note: poor user interface here! 3. Now I will modify the files that need to be worked on. WHY does Retro set permissions to the restore for admin only? This is AFU. More on this later. 4. Time to backup. Whoops. Can't backup to the "rebuilt" v9 file, can we? + Normal backup using Backup Assistant - 6/19/12 3:58 PM at 6/19/12 !Can't add to Backup Set XYZ-A, the Catalog File is locked 6/19/12 3:59:59 PM: Execution incomplete At this point, I truly wonder what the developers want me to do? I DO NOT want to start a new Media Set independent of the first set -- I want the ENTIRE XYZ project to live together, forever. Does this mean that I have to do a full RESTORE of the entire 92gb file, then do a fresh backup? But then I lose all snapshots and versioning. If I simply wanted a clone, I could do that without investing in Retrospect. I want the versioning and incremental data. So what is the "correct" way to migrate a V6 project to V9? What am I missing here? I guess I could make a NEW Media Set and call it "XYZ_2012 revisions" - and then move on... HOWEVER, what happens when (in 5 years) the project manager wants something from XYZ project -- and now we have to sort/search through two sets fo files for the restore. And this also adds to data set backup and catalog issues... more files to worry about (the backup of the backups). I'll rant on about the UI later -- but in the mean time I have to figure out if Retro has a future with me. Is there a better way to migrate from V6 to V9? Final question: what happens if my V6 Storage Set was a DVD? Tape? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted June 19, 2012 Report Share Posted June 19, 2012 Retrospect 8 and 9 can READ backups from version 6, but not write them (and that includes adding to them). So they are locked as the message tells you. Maybe you can create a new media set and then transfer the contents from the v6 backup set to the new media set? I have never tried that. I just archived my v6 backup sets when I bought v8. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Don Lee Posted June 19, 2012 Report Share Posted June 19, 2012 Media set copy will produce a writable backup set (media set), BUT the I believe that the metadata will not match between v6 and v9, so you will get the moral equivalent of a full backup on the copied set when you do your next incremental. I have done this with tape, not with dvd. Tape seems to work though you can read my whining on this forum about some of it. The mismatch of metadata is something that Retro can not really improve in my view, because it stores more metadata in v9, and v6 just doesn't. You can't go back and "fix" the v6 data, and you don't want to ignore the differences. Your best bet is to start new media sets in v9, and only use v6 sets if required. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carpeperdiem Posted June 20, 2012 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2012 Retrospect 8 and 9 can READ backups from version 6, but not write them (and that includes adding to them). So they are locked as the message tells you. OK. So for my XYZ StorageSet that is 92gb, V9 needs to make its own Media set that is also 92gb, just to restore from it. Yes? THEN - I will make NEW mediaset for the ongoing project (new and modified data). So that means for every project that need a restore, we immediately double the storage needs. I guess I can live with that if I understand the process. Where this is tricky from a data management perspective -- let's say within project XYZ there are 10 "groupings". And lets say from our 6 year old restore we open up "grouping 6". We edit the daylights out of it. It's still "grouping 6" but now it's been modified in 2012 -- so we name it, "grouping 6_2012". Fine. Now, 4 years from now, we need to restore some or all of XYZ project. We will have to be VERY careful to restore the 2012 data that replaces the older content... that's why a singel mediaSet is superior to multiple. If it were as easy as doing a full restore and then new Media Set - that would be tedious, but ok, but it blows up the snapshots and incremental nature of the backups. Did the designers of this application actually consider how people use it? Anytime now -- a Retrospect Dev should jump in and tell me what I'm not doing correctly here. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carpeperdiem Posted June 20, 2012 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2012 Media set copy will produce a writable backup set (media set), BUT the I believe that the metadata will not match between v6 and v9, so you will get the moral equivalent of a full backup on the copied set when you do your next incremental. Trying this out right now. Thanks for the suggestion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carpeperdiem Posted June 20, 2012 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2012 Ok. This is a 3 step process. 1. "rebuild" the V6 storage set file; 2. make a new Media Set 3. Copy from 1 to 2 - this requires editing the script. Freaking kludgey. I KNOW user interface designis hard, That's why you guys get the medium bucks, right? This will work for me. I'll report back if it doesn't. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted June 21, 2012 Report Share Posted June 21, 2012 OK. So for my XYZ StorageSet that is 92gb, V9 needs to make its own Media set that is also 92gb, just to restore from it. Yes? No. If you are just going to restore from it, you only need to create a new catalog file from the old backup set. No need to create a new media set with 92GB. But if you would like to add new data THEN you need another 92GB media set. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carpeperdiem Posted June 21, 2012 Author Report Share Posted June 21, 2012 No. If you are just going to restore from it, you only need to create a new catalog file from the old backup set. No need to create a new media set with 92GB. Hmm... can you share the process to "create a new catalog file from old storage set" ? Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted June 21, 2012 Report Share Posted June 21, 2012 Hmm... can you share the process to "create a new catalog file from old storage set" ? Thanks. I don't have access to the manual right now (and for some days ahead), but I think it's called a "recatalog" process. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carpeperdiem Posted June 21, 2012 Author Report Share Posted June 21, 2012 I have the manual. And working in the app. It appears the ONLY way to "repair" or recatalog an older Storage Set is first convert it to a new Media Set using "repair". This function does nothing more than clone the old file into a new file, but it DOES NOT let you add to the backup. Really poor design. From there, I can either "copy" to a NEW file, or just restore as needed. The problem here is that let's say your V6 XYZ backup (92gb) needs to be restored from. You actually have XYZ-a and XYZ-b. Each @ 92gb, and XYZ-c stored off-site, right? 92gb x 3 -- you now want to restore from XYZ-a. You now have XYZ-a2, another 92gb, and you can't do anything with it (except restore). So we now have to choose -- do we "copy" to a new media set, another 92gb - then proceed with backing up new data to the new file (XYZ_2012-a, and of course, the -b and -c set -- we've now created 6 new 92gb+ files -- just to solve the data migration issue, I have to waste more than 1/2 a terrabyte of storage. Not to mention time involved. I can probably toss the 3 "intermediary" files (the files created by the "repair") - since these immediately copy to the new Media Sets, and are useless (except to restore from). HOWEVER, once the copy operation is done, the NEW Media Set should allow us to toss (or put into deep hibernation) the original (3) V6 files, right? What would you do? Where are the company reps? Can someone from the development team jump in on this and tell me that I have it all wrong and if I did a better job of RTFM I wouldn't be making this as complicated? PS -- anyone who tells me that I don't need 3 backup sets of the same data should go jump off a tall bridge. After paying for data rescue once and almost losing my business, we now have 3 copies of everything, one copy always offsite. Drives are afraid to crash on me now since they know there is no incentive in it for them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted June 21, 2012 Report Share Posted June 21, 2012 What would you do? I would restore once from version 6, restoring all files. Then I would make a new media set with all the files in version 9 and go from there with future backups. If I would need to restore a version older than that, I would do that from the v6 backups, that I would store. Where are the company reps? This is (as you have noticed) a user-to-user discussion. You may want to contact Retrospect support:http://www.retrospect.com/support If you don't have a support contract you can buy a support incident. It's really cheap. And if it indeed is a bug, you will get a refund. PS -- anyone who tells me that I don't need 3 backup sets of the same data should go jump off a tall bridge. I use four sets, three of them always off site. When the hard drives holding the backups become full, I buy a new set of four hard drives, storing the old ones. I used the current set since 2010 and the ones before that from 2006 to 2010. It is soon time for a new set. This time I will get 2TB drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carpeperdiem Posted June 21, 2012 Author Report Share Posted June 21, 2012 I would restore once from version 6, restoring all files. Then I would make a new media set with all the files in version 9 and go from there with future backups. Ah. But then we lose all incremental versions and snapshots. I think a copy is what I need to do. I will contact support. This is (as you have noticed) a user-to-user discussion. I thought company reps surfaced from time to time? Thanks for your posts! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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