Feature quereis for Retrospect 7.7 for Windows

[jagsrao 0]

Hi,

 

I was doing a comparison between Retrospect and other tools. I wanted to know if Retrospect provides :

a)Drive Spanning

b)Backup from Network Drives

c)Capacity alerts of the media in advance

 

I am sorry if I have posted in a wrong category.

 

Regards

 

Jagdish

[Mayoff 124]

A & B for sure are included.

 

C) What type of alert are you looking for? What type of media?

[Ramon88 2]

An option like C would be a bit difficult for most real life scenarios. If you are backing up a network of clients Retrospect has the scan and compare all clients before starting the backup process itself. That would be the only way it can know the capacity needed for the storage of the data to be backed up.

[rhwalker 2]

And some devices (like Drobo) lie when reporting capacity.

[jagsrao 0]

Thanks for the inputs.

The media could be hard disk and the alerts could be for the disk capacity.

[jagsrao 0]

One more query...

When the data is backed on the media (hard disk or tape), is there any way of performing a crc verification by your backup software ?

[Ramon88 2]

And some devices (like Drobo) lie when reporting capacity.

Quite true, at least if you do not put 2TB drives in there. Well, even then it would 'lie' I suppose, because of the space lost due to the redundant information that needs to be stored. But this all, at least as far as it concerns Drobo, is by design. Real capacity can be monitored by use of the Drobo Dashboard software and the LED indicators on front of the unit. But indeed Retrospect would not be aware of the capacity.

 

One could however limit a disk based backup set to a fixed (maximum) amount of storage and thus avoiding real life capacity overrun. We do that all the time.

[Ramon88 2]

One more query...

When the data is backed on the media (hard disk or tape), is there any way of performing a crc verification by your backup software ?

Retrospect generates an MD5 digest of the read files when doing the backup and rereads the stored data and matches the MD5 hash. This way the source does not need to be reread. This is quite reliable.

 

The other option is to have Retrospect do a reread of all the source data after the backup and it will match that data one-on-one. This is the most reliable method, but will double backup time.

 

Personally I would stick with the MD5-method. But if you need almost 100% reliability instead of 99,9999999% (or so) you can use the second method.