Does Retrospect Consolidate Tapes?

[tfreeman]

I have a new installation of a Windows 2003 Server with Retrospect MultiServer. We have 4TB of disk space, so all the backup data will reside on disk. I have it set up to keep 10 copies of data. Because of this, it seems pointless to do weekly fulls. However, we will be cloning (transfer backup sets) to LTO2. Is there a way to colocate/consolidate/what ever you want to call it/ the tapes so we don't have a bunch of tapes with a few unexpired files on them?

[natew]

Hi

 

You are correct - weekly fulls are unnecessary.

 

Backup set transfer copies the entire contents of the backup set. As a result you will get some outdated files on your tapes.

 

Have you looked at the snapshot transfer feature? That will create a synthetic full backup of just the snapshots you select. Any old/ unneeded files will not be copied to tape.

 

Thanks

Nate

[tfreeman]

I'm not that familiar with Retrospect. Do you have to manually select the snapshots, or can you set a script once a week to capture only the relevant non-expired data in the Backup Set?

[natew]

Hi

 

You can manually select old snapshots. You can also have Retrospect automatically select the most recent snapshots for transfer.

 

Everything in Retrospect is snapshot based so you don't end up with unnecessary data in the backup set. Any files that are not used in a snapshot are not kept on disk or transferred to tape.

 

Thanks

Nate