toshy Posted February 6, 2015 Report Share Posted February 6, 2015 Retrospect seems to be stuck on grooming a media set and has been running for over 20 hours and it is slowing my network too such an extent that other client/server applications are too slow to use. My media sets contain about ten different volumes, a mixture of local and client machines. Usually grooming seems to be painless and relatively quick - my backups start at 19.30 and are usually finished before the start of business the next day. Can I ask how often grooming will take place if it is activated on a media set? Grooming is set at maintaining 10 backups. I do know that stopping the grooming operation will mean that I have to rebuild the catalogue, another 24 hour job, in my experience. Is there a safe way to terminate it. Should it take 20 hours to groom or has it hung? Thanks Roger Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Monafly Posted February 7, 2015 Report Share Posted February 7, 2015 It all depends on the size of the media set and number of files involved. I've seen it take 30-40 hrs for a multi-terabyte set. Can you see progress? One can (very occasionally) see indication of number of files or remaining files show up in the lower pane of the summary window of activities when the groom is selected. As long as this shows progress, let it run, or as you note, you'll have to rebuild the catalog if you stop it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted February 7, 2015 Report Share Posted February 7, 2015 Can I ask how often grooming will take place if it is activated on a media set? As soon as the available (free) space will not hold the ongoing backup. I always run a groom script over every weekend, to prevent grooming from happening during a backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toshy Posted February 7, 2015 Author Report Share Posted February 7, 2015 Thanks very much. I'll do a weekend groom in future. On a related point, In case of data loss or drive damage I duplicate my Retrospect catalog files to a client machine and to Dropbox. These files are in the region of 25G each (x 2 for each backup) and the duplicate script takes forever as it is copying the whole file each time. Would it be quicker for me to make a backup script for these catalogs which – presumably only with Retrospect 11 – would only require to backup changed blocks in each file? Or are the catalog files exempted from the increment block backup process? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toshy Posted February 9, 2015 Author Report Share Posted February 9, 2015 I followed the advice to run a grooming script but I don't think I did it correctly. You said that if grooming is operative in a backup script it will be activated as a disk fills up, so I deactivated grooming on my backup script to prevent they happening. Then I created a groom script of r the relevant media set and scheduled it. But when the script tuns it says that grooming is not enabled on the media set. How do I enable it without it becoming part of the routine operations for the backup script – and taking forever at inconvenient times? Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted February 9, 2015 Report Share Posted February 9, 2015 Grooming (or not) is a property of the backup set, not the backup script. So enable grooming on the backup set and have a groom script running at weekends (or other convenient times). Since the backup set is groomed, there should be plenty of space, so Retrospect should not have to groom in the middle of a backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toshy Posted February 9, 2015 Author Report Share Posted February 9, 2015 Thanks Lennart. It's clear now what I was doing wrong. Did you see my post about whether I should Copy catalog files or Backup them. What would be the quickest way to safeguard them? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maser Posted February 9, 2015 Report Share Posted February 9, 2015 Copying them -- when the Engine is not running (or when you can be sure they aren't being accessed) -- should be fine. I do that every so often when I make a backup of my drive containing my media sets. In general, though, I've never restored the backup copies. Usually if a Groom has thrown up errors in the media set, I'm not going to restore the catalog -- I'm going to rebuild it. - Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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