Snapshots vs. sessions

[cmcfarling]

Is there a need to differentiate between snapshots and sessions? When viewing the properties for a backup set the snapshots tab shows the active snapshots, or, the snapshots that are stored in the catalog file. It's possible that other snapshots are available. To make a snapshot available (active), one clicks Add and then selects from a list of sessions. It would seem that only sessions that actually have a snapshot associated with them should show in this list. Perhaps that is how it is supposed to work but recently I had a situation where this was not the case. I attempted to add a snapshot from a session only to find out that the snapshot didn't exist. Why did it even show up in the list as an available session to load a snapshot from? If that is a bug that needs to be fixed first of all.

 

All of this can be rather confusing though and can be simplified. Why not do away with sessions and just have snapshots? Then, a snapshot is either active (stored in the catalog file) or not active (stored on the media). When someone clicks Add to add a snapshot to the active list, they're presented with a list of inactive snapshots. Or another way to do it, the snapshot list shows every snapshot, active or inactive. Each one would then have some sort of signifier (grayed out, icon, etc) to show what its status is.

 

Either way, Retrospect has to be smart enough to not display snapshots that no longer exist, such as ones that have been groomed out.

 

 

Chris

[cmcfarling]

After thinking about it some more, I definitely think the best way is to list all snapshots (active and inactive) in one window. That way the user sees all possible snapshots in one window instead of having them split between 2 windows. Here's what my snapshot window would look like if EMC said "hey Chris, if you care about it so much why don't you design it"

 

http://www.pacific-plus.com/retrospect/snapshotwindow.jpg