Morgan Daly Posted May 24, 2013 Report Share Posted May 24, 2013 Hello, I just want to confirm that I understand things correctly as it relates to Catalog Files. As per the explanation below am I correct that basically catalog files are in a sense convenient time savers, but that in the event that you the catalog was lost as long as you have the backup you can rebuild the catalog but it will take a long time? Catalog Files Retrospect uses a separate catalog file (usually stored in /Library/Application Support/Retrospect/ on the Retrospect server) to keep track of all of the files and folders in a Media Set. You can think of the catalog as an index or table of contents of the files on the backup media. The catalog lets you view the contents of a Media Set without requiring the media to be inserted in the backup device, greatly speeding up finding and retrieving files. A catalog file is required for all operations that copy files to and from a Media Set. Retrospect can repair damaged catalogs, using the Repair button in the list view toolbar under Media Sets. If the catalog is lost or damaged too severely for the repair operation, Retrospect can rebuild it by reading and reindexing the media. Thanks Morgan 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted May 24, 2013 Report Share Posted May 24, 2013 The time depends on many things. If the media set has many members and you turned off "fast catalog rebuild", then Retrospect has to go through all members. If "fast catalog rebuild" is enabled, then Retrospect only needs to go through the last member. But even that can take hours, depending on your configuration. A disk member set on (by now) five year old hardware, using a NAS as the member takes about 7 hours for a 1TB single member media set. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morgan Daly Posted May 30, 2013 Author Report Share Posted May 30, 2013 The time depends on many things. If the media set has many members and you turned off "fast catalog rebuild", then Retrospect has to go through all members. If "fast catalog rebuild" is enabled, then Retrospect only needs to go through the last member. But even that can take hours, depending on your configuration. A disk member set on (by now) five year old hardware, using a NAS as the member takes about 7 hours for a 1TB single member media set. Thank you I guess though the part of my question that I was more interested in is whether catalog files can simply be rebuilt from a backup? Thanks Morgs Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prl Posted May 30, 2013 Report Share Posted May 30, 2013 Thank you I guess though the part of my question that I was more interested in is whether catalog files can simply be rebuilt from a backup? Thanks Morgs Yes, that's what Media Sets>Rebuild does. But it can be slow, and it is intended for use for disaster recovery, if a catalog file is deleted or somehow else destroyed. I make a copy of my catalog files to offline storage after I do a backup. It also makes a lot of sense to store the Retrospect Catalogs on different physical drives from the drives that they are backing up. This is because if a drive has a complete physical failure, and it stored the catalog of its own backup, you'll have to rebuild the catalog to do the restore of the broken drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morgan Daly Posted May 30, 2013 Author Report Share Posted May 30, 2013 Yes, that's what Media Sets>Rebuild does. But it can be slow, and it is intended for use for disaster recovery, if a catalog file is deleted or somehow else destroyed. I make a copy of my catalog files to offline storage after I do a backup. It also makes a lot of sense to store the Retrospect Catalogs on different physical drives from the drives that they are backing up. This is because if a drive has a complete physical failure, and it stored the catalog of its own backup, you'll have to rebuild the catalog to do the restore of the broken drive. Thank You... I am starting to understand how it all works. I wonder has anyone tried simply storing the catalog files in dropbox? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prl Posted May 31, 2013 Report Share Posted May 31, 2013 ... I wonder has anyone tried simply storing the catalog files in dropbox? No reason I can think of why not. They can get a bit big, especially if they're not kept compressed (I have two ~35MB, uncompressed, and two others ~11MB, compressed, but they're fairly small backups). It depends on how big yours are and what the upload speed is like to your cloud storage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morgan Daly Posted May 31, 2013 Author Report Share Posted May 31, 2013 No reason I can think of why not. They can get a bit big, especially if they're not kept compressed (I have two ~35MB, uncompressed, and two others ~11MB, compressed, but they're fairly small backups). It depends on how big yours are and what the upload speed is like to your cloud storage. Yes, the file size did concern me in relation to my suggested solution. Thanks everyone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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