Understanding Proactive a bit better. . .

[Humptydank]

Hello!

 

I'm the tech guy for a small company, and I'm not a backup pro, but I'm the best we have so forgive the newbieish questions. :-)

 

We're evaluating Retrospect, and one of the major attractions for us was the Proactive backup feature. In particular we have a remote workstation that, although it's on a broadband connection, isn't always up and the connection isn't always reliable.

 

The initial backup is big, 35 gig, and if I'm reading things right should take about 4 days of transfer time to complete. It's nearly guaranteed to be disconnected many times before it's done, but if I understand Proactive correctly it should then re-schedule itself and try again.

 

My questions are:

 

-- On some previous tries, I saw in the logs a whole series of attempts, each getting more files as Proactive re-connected and went about its business. How do I then know when I have a completed backup set? Among the multiple tries it's very hard to determine which errors were corrected on later attempts, etc. Is there an easy way to tell when the initial backup has completed and we've achieved at least the first level of safety?

 

-- I assume that once the full backup is completed, then the progressive backups will be considereably less time under normal usage of the machine?

 

-- Did I read the help file correctly (yes, I read the help file. I'm so ashamed...), that within a single backup set, Retrospect will not duplicate the same files even if they are on different machines? So if I have common.dll in the c:\windows directory on machines A and B, Retrospect will detect that they are the same file and only store it once, using snapshots to determine who gets what on a restore? If that's true, then it sounds like it would benefit me to put the two remote machines, both running XP and both needing Proactive, into the same backup set. That way Restrospect would only try to fetch all the system files over the slow connection once. Is that true?

 

Sorry to make this so long, but thanks in advance for any advice!

 

-- Dave

[natew]

Hi

 

You are on the right track and you have actually answered a few of your own questions.

 

The key is Retrospect checks the files that already exist in the backup set before starting a new backup. As a result you won't back up identical files from multiple soruces. That also means that partially failed backups will pick up where they left off.

 

So even if your DSL based backup fails often you will still eventually get all the files from that machine. You will also get a snapshot of that machine each time a backup runs to completion. You can use the snapshot for full system restores.

 

Hope that helps

 

Nate