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Running Out of HD Space, Which Files to Move to RAID?


rkraemer

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I work for a school running Retrospect 8 on an Apple 10.6.8 server (set up by a prior IT person who is no longer here). This server backs up the other servers and the backups are stored on an attached Drobo.  The backups had not been working for a while and upon investigation the internal HD of the server was filling up each night when the backups occurred.  I researched and moved the Catalog folder to the Drobo, assuming that was getting large.  That worked for a few days but now we're getting the disk full warnings at night again, though when I check the next morning there's plenty of free space so there must be temporary files clogging things up.  My Google-Fu is escaping me.  We have about 120 GBs free on the internal drive, but every night when the backups attempt to run that internal drive fills up and then empties again.  I'd like to move any files that expand greatly in size during backup to the Drobo (which has several TB's free and is set up in a mirrored RAID). My current suspicions lie with Config80.dat, Config80.bak and RtrExec.dir which all live in their default location of /Library/Application Support/Retrospect.  Which of those do you think is causing this and can I move them to the Drobo?  

 

Thanks so much for your help!!

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  • 4 months later...

A bit more information about your setup would be helpful. What version and edition of Retrospect are you using? How much RAM does the backup server have? You say that the internal HD has 120 GB free, but what is the total capacity of the drive? Might here be other processes running on the backup machine at the same time the backups are scheduled?

 

How are you receiving messages about the drive being full? From Retrospect? Is it clear which volume is being referred to?

 

What is the total volume of files you are trying to back up? How are you accessing them? Via Retrospect Client software on the remote machines (what versions) or by mounting the volumes on the backup server's desktop?

 

Retrospect does not back up to volumes; it backs up to Media Sets, which are composed of Members. It's possible to set the permissible size of a media set member to be smaller than the destination volume (though this should result in Retrospect's asking you to specify a new member). What is the total size of the media set or sets, as reported by Retrospect? How much space are they actually taking up on the volume where they are stored?

 

Have you tried creating scripts to back up your source volumes separately? How about defining a favorite folder on a source volume and running a test script? Do either of these work better?

 

AFAIK, Retrospect wants to see Config80.dat and Config80.bak reside in /Library/Application Support/Retrospect. I haven't tried (or seen a need) to locate them elsewhere. Config80.dat contains information about past backups, and so should be larger than Config80.bak. What are the size of these files in your situation?

 

Retro 8.2 was the first reasonably-functional version of the post-Retro 6 era, but was still quite buggy. Newer versions are considerably better.

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