mfromo Posted January 4, 2005 Report Share Posted January 4, 2005 Hi, I'm new to Retrospect Express (or any backup processes for that matter) and have a couple of questions. I've setup an automatic nightly backup and see that everyday new .rdb files are created. I assume these are recording any changes to the folders I'm backing up. Do these files just keep piling up? Anyone have any suggestions or point me to the right place regarding managing these files better? Thanks for your responses Mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dld Posted January 4, 2005 Report Share Posted January 4, 2005 Retrospect Express performs what Dantz calls a Progressive Backup. TITLE: Why Retrospect is Better Backup -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Discussion: Most backup admins in the NT/2000 world perform "full" backups every night. Why? Restore reliability. When we created Retrospect, we looked at how other file-based backup software worked (Backup Exec, ARCserve, etc.), and we were amazed to see that nothing had really changed since the days of DOS 2.x. These programs today still rely on the file's archive attribute to determine what to back up in a "new and changed files" backup. Their incremental and differential backups save time and media during the backup process, but they make restoring difficult, and exact restores IMPOSSIBLE. If you did seven incremental backups, then you have to perform seven incremental restores! Good luck! That's why most anyone who has had to try to rebuild a server from incremental backups now uses a strategy of full backups every night. Well, Retrospect is smarter than that. Retrospect can restore any volume in a single pass over the backup media, even though it only performs "new and changed file" backups. This is possible because Retrospect performs a more intelligent method of file selection, ensuring that one copy of each unique file from the source is copied to *each* backup set. Retrospect doesn't know how to do a "full" or an "incremental" backup. Instead, it always backs up the files that aren't already present in the backup set. When the operator selects a "Recycle" or "New Media" operation in Retrospect, they're only changing the media handling parameters; reuse the same media/backup set or start with a new set of media entirely. When it's time to restore, Retrospect knows what files were on the source at each backup (from saved Snapshots), so it simply copies all the files from the backup set that are needed to make the source look exactly like it used to at any previous point in time, and only with one restore operation. Taking this one step further, this design allows Retrospect to keep multiple, complete backup sets, but requiring only one for a restore. Bring a set back from a week in offsite storage, and Retrospect will only copy the files to that set that were created or modified in the last week. Compared to other Windows backup software, Retrospect gives you the speed and media savings of incremental backups with the reliability and precision of full backups. It has all of the advantages of both, with none of the disadvantages. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Retrospect Express can perform two types of backups: Normal and Recycle. Periodically you should do a Recycle Backup to avoid ending up with an ever-increasing size backup folder. See Options. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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