Grooming manually

[jez]

Hi

 

I am trying to use the grooming facility in Retrospect 7.7 Windows to manually groom.

 

I do not want to use the built in policy because it only keeps a few daily backups.

The keep last x is no good as it only allows 99 - which is only 3 months of daily backups.

I couldn't find any way to specify my own grooming policy?

 

So I assume I will have to manually make it forget the backups I don't want - but this seems impossible.

 

To get the option to Groom, you HAVE to choose one of the built in grooming policies (last x (1-99) or the other which keeps a few daily weekly and monthly).

 

My first question is - if there is enough free space (backing up to disk) then will it only groom the snapshots I have told it to forget? Or will it use the policy, regardless of available space, and groom the snapshots I don't want to groom.

 

Yes, I have found that I could lock them - but that is a pain because, for some reason, it only shows me about 3 snapshots. To get to the rest, I have to 'retrieve' them, which is painfully slow.

 

Also I don't even get the 'lock' option unless I enable one of the grooming options.

 

Aside - any way to actually make it retrieve all the snapshots without having to do them one by one?

 

[update]

Hmm - I just forgot to disable the grooming, so its set to keep last 99, and when I closed the window, it said it was retrieving old snapshots to stop them being groomed... Its now retrieving them, and I have turned off the grooming option again, so at least I will have all the snapshots back.

 

Looks like I have to enable grooming, it retrieves the snapshots, I lock them, then set it to groom older than 99, and then periodically I go through and lock all the snapshots, so it doesn't actually groom them ???

 

Maybe I can make it always lock new snapshots, in the script?

 

Sigh - this has to be the most bizarre program I have used in a long time.