Disk Grooming vs Recycle Backup

[bluffwood]

I'm doing normal backups to an external disk drive with "Grooming to Retrospect Defined Policy" enabled. I can make backups for about two months before the backup drive is full and grooming is triggered. I'm using Retrospect Express 7.6.

 

Can I safely do this forever or are there reasons to periodically run a Recycle Backup?

 

Thank you for any thoughts.

 

Mark

[Ramon88]

Sometimes, when a grooming Backup Set gets older, you can run into problems, like Retrospect will/can say it can groom no further. This happend to me occasionally.

 

Probably the grooming process isn't 100% efficient grooming out older data which might get stuck in the Backup Set (stuck as in: it just takes up space).

 

I found that grooming set up to do a fixed number of days (like 10 or so) will do a splendid job for a long time (got one running like that for about a year now).

 

So the conclusion is, your mileage may vary. Providing you have enough space available, it will be able to groom for a long time. However the grooming process itself might get more inefficient over time due to the data set growing very large and 'deep'. So do what I do, alternate backups between an A and a B set and when needed recycle one when you think grooming is getting problematic. That way you always have another recent backup laying around. The only drawback is it takes up twice the storage and incremental backups take twice as long (due to the longer separations (every other day).