JoeSulik Posted July 18, 2003 Report Share Posted July 18, 2003 I am currently running Retospect Workgoup 5.0 in OS 9. All of my clients are running OS X. I use 4 - 120GB firewire external drives as backup media. Under OS 9, retrospect sees these drives as removable. Under OS X is this possible, or must I backup to firewire external drives as a file? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick_Gray Posted July 18, 2003 Report Share Posted July 18, 2003 I have exactly the same desire. I'm backing up a dozen or so G4s with a dual 1G G4 onto a set of WD 120GB firewire-mounted drives. They're close to being full and I'm unsure how to switch in a new set of disks. It'd be wonderful if Retrospect would see them as removable media. rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted July 18, 2003 Report Share Posted July 18, 2003 When backing up to hard drive with Retrospect, the correct type of backup set is a File backup set. Under OS 9, some disk formatting utilities incorrectly set the "removable" bit on some drives. Some users with external FW drives incorrectly used Retrospect to access a fixed platter external drive as if it were a removable device (with media). When hard drives are backed up to incorrectly a removable drive, you may not have the ability to restore. We hope to be able to backup to hard drives as removable disks in a future release. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeSulik Posted July 18, 2003 Author Report Share Posted July 18, 2003 So external Firewire hard drives are still not treated as removable under OS X by Retrospect. Thanks, I have been trying to determine that for a while. I have delayed the OS 9 to X upgrade of our backup servers for some time now, because of the ability under OS 9 to treat our 120 GB firewire drives as removable media. Except for our two backup servers, all of our clients are OS X. I hope that this feature becomes available for Retrospect for OS X before I have to upgrade our backup server hardware. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick_Gray Posted July 19, 2003 Report Share Posted July 19, 2003 Yeah, I've been hearing that for a while now. I've lived though using big 1/2" tape reels, cartridge tapes, Exabyte tapes, and I've no desire to invest in VXA. I think the era of tape backup should be over. Since IDE disks of huge size are cheap (250 GB for $230 on dealmac last week) it makes no sense to me to invest in an expensive tape drive and tapes that might not be readable in 5 years. We're a research lab and we generate lots of data. I worry about backup files and catalogs getting huge. I'm only backing up a dozen or so Macs (everything running OS X) but every one has a minimum of 40 GB disk space and most double or triple that. Even being selective at what directories I back up, it still adds up to an amount of space we only dreamed about 10 years ago. So... I think it's time for some new ideas in backups... solutions for backing up terabytes of data onto cheap, fast hard drives and making it easy to build a library of backups. Incremental catalog files need to be created so you don't end up with a single catalog of 100 GB and single backup files of terabytes. We do backups of every machine every night (we have experiments that cost thousands of dollars each so we can't afford to do backups less often). I'd like to see a Dantz FAQ answering "How do I do an autmated back up a terabyte of data every night?" rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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