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How to groom out backups older than xx days old?


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Hmm. Not good.

 

We have thousands of backups to disk and need to set a threshold for how long data is kept.

 

Is there a penalty (other than time to rebuild) to deleting the .RDB files older than a certain age and rebuilding the catalog files?

 

In other words, to delete all snapshots older than August 30th, I would delete all .RDB files older than August 30th then rebuild the catalog file and it would only then include the newer sets. Would this be viable? Manually deleting snapshots would require a considerable number of hours and is absolutely inefficient in terms of maintenance.

 

If this would corrupt future snapshots, are there other options? (Such as moving snapshots to another location then deleting that set of data.)

 

Due to the number of terabytes I am dealing with I need a fairly efficient way to do this.

 

Thanks!

 

Matt

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Manually deleting .rdb files is usually a bad idea. Another alternative is to perform a backup set transfer and setting the selector to only include files that were backed up after a certain date. This could possibly leave your backup set incomplete because it won't transfer the files that were originally backed up and have never been modified. I would go this route rather than deleting the .rdb files if you have the available disk space to do so.

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In other words, to delete all snapshots older than August 30th, I would delete all .RDB files older than August 30th then rebuild the catalog file and it would only then include the newer sets. Would this be viable?

 


No, that would be BAD. Those files contains files still "alive" on at least one computer, probably many of them.

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This is turning into a real problem. frown.gif

 

I inherited a situation that is rather complicated and I need to find a way to easily deal with it without spending many hours doing nothing but babysitting Retrospect.

 

The issue is that we have a number of Retrospect servers, each with a few TB of drive shelf storage. There are a few hundred computers on each Retrospect server, all backing up snapshots and handling the data in "Streams". There are multiple streams per server, all containing a specific set of machines.

 

I have scripted a grooming operation that will groom specific streams on each server daily but some of the streams have a quantity of data that is getting out of control. The data retention is much higher than our maximum retention and we need to get rid of the oldest snapshots.

 

Due to the number of streams it is unreasonable to manually remove snapshots from a stream as there are not enough hours in the day and it would be more than a full time job of doing nothing but deleting old snapshots constantly. I have looked at the snapshot transfer scripting and it seems more focused on copying files, not snapshots themselves. Even if I were to use the snapshot transfer, I would have to rebuild hundreds of streams.

 

I just wish there was a way to say "Groom to remove snapshots older than XX days."

 

I am at a great loss as to how to solve this without completely re-engineering the backup system. Due to the amount of data on disk already my options are limited. Any thoughts?

 

Matt

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I just wish there was a way to say "Groom to remove snapshots older than XX days."

 


You wish for a feature that the program does not have. I suggest that you make a feature request.

 

Those of us who have the Macintosh version have never been able to groom snapshots in any manner whatsoever, and there seems little possibility that we will ever get the grooming features that you have.

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OK with me. How do I file a formal feature request?

(This is just a user-to-user forum.)

 


 

http://www.emcinsignia.com/supportupdates/service/feedback/

 

I will most definitely be requesting this as there is a HUGE need. It seems like something that would be very easy to add to the product but save people (like myself) many hours.

 

Thanks all!

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How do I file a formal feature request?

 


Windows product suggestions

Macintosh product suggestions

 

Just a warning - you might get what you ask for. If, for some reason, you happen to have a long holiday or forget to change media, etc., or, for some reason, Retrospect stops making backups, you might end up deleting all of your snapshots because all would be older than XXX days.

 

It's not the most pressing feature that I want because we only back up to tape, but I agree that it would be nice to have for those who back up to disk. I would prefer as the top programming priority that the programmers fix the bug whereby Retrospect refuses to honor the names of barcoded pre-named erased tapes in an autoloader when looking for a new tape, and instead uses erased tapes in an arbitrary whimsical manner, making it impossible to manage an inventory of tapes that are barcoded upon receipt. Retrospect support refuses to call this a bug because it is the documented behavior (use whatever erased tapes it finds), and so I requested this be fixed as a "feature request" almost two years ago. No action on my request, or on any of the others that I have requested over the years, so don't hold your breath for your feature request.

 

Sorry for the off-topic grumble.

 

Russ

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I agree that it would be a handy feature ''to remove backups older than a specified date''. The current ''Make sure to remove backups older than'' feature is not clear enough to use because you don't know how many backups you have to keep to remain the backups for a specific time. You can ofcourse also use the lock feature for old backups that you want to keep anyway, as I do. Instead of using the specified # of backups keeped feature you can also use the ''Groom to retrospect defined policy'' feature. But the drawback of this is that you can't keep the daily backups of more than a week back.

 

greetz

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