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"Self Grooming" Media Set?


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Can Media Sets Groom themselves without manual intervention or a script instructing them to do so?

 

I have few Media Sets configured to Groom after 30 backups. This was setup when the Media Set was created. I haven't written (or ran) any Grooming scripts on these Media Sets yet.

 

Today, I got an automated message from my Retrospect 8 server indicating one of the Media Sets had been groomed (reclaimed 36GB of space too). I was surprised to see this message, because I dont have any Grooming scripts written, and nothing related to Grooming has ever been executed by yet thus far. Other than setting my MEdia Sets to Groom after 30 backups, I havent done anything with Grooming at all.

 

 

I was under the impression that the process of Grooming had to be:

 

1) Manually ran from the Retro Admin console. Or...

2) Scripted to run.

 

So, apparently, based on my observations above, Media Sets are "self-cleaning" and can Groom themselves? Is this possible?

 

 

 

 

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If a media set is set for grooming it will either groom from a script/manually, or when it nears the limit of the available disk space to store the media set.

 

I believe it fires off after something like 5% left of the free space is hit -- I forget the exact percentage -- or it's a fixed amount of space like 1 Gig left -- it varies if you have the catalog stored on the drive containing the media set or not.)

 

I think this is somewhere in the User's Guide (isn't it?)

 

 

 

But the set won't groom itself if you aren't using it -- you have to be actively using the set for it to hit the limit and then it kicks over to grooming (IIRC).

 

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OK, here's the grooming info from the Users Guide (p 236-237)

 

 

 

The grooming options are:

• No grooming: When the backup drive fills up, Retrospect asks for another hard drive on which to store additional backups. All of your backups on the original hard drive are preserved.

 

 

• Groom to keep this number of backups: Specify the number of back- ups you want to preserve for each source when the backup drive fills up, or when you run a scripted or manual groom operation. Retrospect

then automatically “grooms†(i.e., deletes) all the other, older backups on the hard drive to make room for new data.

 

 

• Groom to Retrospect defined policy: When the backup drive fills up, or when you run a scripted or manual groom operation, Retrospect uses its own grooming policy to delete old backups. At a minimum, Retrospect’s policy retains two backups for each source, saving the last backup of the day for each source from the two most recent days on which each source was backed up. Given enough space in the Media Set, Retrospect keeps a backup of each source for every day in the last week, a backup for each week in the last month, and a backup for each previous month.

Normally, you set a grooming option and need to do no more. But since you can turn grooming on or off for a given Disk Media Set at any time, you may have a nearly-full Media Set that you want to groom immediately after you enable grooming for the set.

 

Note: When you activate grooming for a Media Set, Retrospect will retrieve the point-in-time file and folder listings from the Media Set for each source, going back as far as the number of backups you’ve set to keep in the grooming options, and add them to the Media Set’s Catalog. Because Catalogs for Media Sets with active grooming policies need to store this additional data, they will be larger in size than Catalogs belonging to .

 

To groom a Disk Media Set manually, select the Media Set in the list, and click Groom in the Media Set toolbar. Retrospect displays a dialog asking you to confirm the groom operation. Click Groom. Retrospect begins a Groom- ing operation, removing excess backups from the Media Set, according to the grooming options. You can monitor its progress in the Activities list. When Retrospect finishes, click the Past button in the scope bar of the Activity list for details on whether the grooming was successful. If the operation was not successful, click the Log tab for additional information.

Edited by Guest
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  • 2 weeks later...

Is there any way to determine how many backups have been done?

 

That is, if I tell a script that I want it to backup to say 10 backups to a set, then groom, is there a way to look at the backups to determine how many backups have been done?

 

This would be useful for determining how many backups to assign to a given size of Disk...

 

Then one could set the grooming to 10 on a 500GB Disk, then look to see how many backups have been done, and calculate ( perhaps only roughly ) how many more backups can be assigned ( 10 now, huh? Looks like I could up it to 50! ), before it starts auto grooming...

 

Anyway, is there any way to peek inside Retrospect Media Set to see how many have been done at any given point?

 

jeff

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If you have turned on Grooming, then you can look at Past Backups to see each backup for that media set.

 

I don't think there's another way to determine how many backups of a client (unless your log goes back that far...)

 

 

As far as looking in the Media Set -- it would probably depend on how often you do your backups, but the files are time stamped, so you could do a rough calculation that way.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Even if a media set is not set to self-groom, I believe that during the restore process, there is an option or button to retrieve older/other backups. I recall sifting through all the dates of all the old backups. When you choose one, then it builds a file list for that date to restore from.

 

I'd give more specific details, but I'm going from memory, cause my server is currently down. Sorry.

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