Verify synthetic full snapshot

[robertdana]

If I understand the new grooming feature for disk backup sets properly, it's now advantageous not to recycle disk backup sets regularly as was required in the past... grooming intelligently manages the available backup storage space on a hard drive such that the maximum amount of useful history is retained.

 

This is a great feature, but I do worry about backup sets being used indefinitely... it seems to me that it creates the possibility of minor backup set or catalog corruption going undetected and uncorrected for a very long period of time. Where regular recycles would correct such problems, a snapshot that has been used for a year's worth of daily backups with grooming might get a little crufty.

 

It would ease my mind if there were a way to verify not only the changed files backed up in the most recent snapshot, but also to verify that *all* other files in the corresponding "synthetic full snapshot" match the files currently on disk. This is not the same as the existing "verify media" feature... it would apply only to the most recent snapshot, and would verify against actual file data rather than simply ensuring the integrity of the backup set media. It's more in-depth than the pre-backup scan since it would check against actual data in the backup set rather than just the catalog.

 

I certainly wouldn't want to run this frequently, as I imagine it would be time consuming, but if there were a way to schedule it to run as part of a backup on an occasional basis, that would be great.

 

-Robert

[natew]

Hi

 

That is a good suggestion.

 

For the moment you can try this:

Every once in a while run a backup with the matching options turned off. This will force Retrospect to backup everything from the disk again. Then run a grooming operation. I suspect that will keep the files you backed up more recently and get rid of the old ones..

 

Thanks

Nate