Grooming - Out of Disk Space

[mnc042]

Hi all,

 

OK, I thought I understood what Grooming did but maybe after last night's run I'm not so sure anymore.

 

Got a Retrospect 7 server backing up several Linux machines and Macs/PCs. Goes to a large disk (400GB), with the backup set policy set to take 99% of the disk, default grooming policy is activated.

 

All went well until last night, when I see in the logs an error: "Grooming Backup Set Homenet01 failed, error -1115 (disk full)".

 

I thought the whole point of grooming was to keep as many backups as possible, but pull space out of the backpset until the disk again had enough space? Why did I see this error, and how do I now recover from it?

 

My backupset says it has 2gb free. Will the default grooming keep pulling older backups out until space is again recovered?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

\marc

[Mayoff]

How much free space do you have on the C: disk? During grooming data gets cached to that disk.

 

After a grooming failure, don't forget to rebuild the catalog file.

[mnc042]

my C: drive is rather small, only 34.3 GB free on that volume.

 

Could that be the problem?

 

My backup volume currently has only 2.58gb free; will it ultimately free some space on there to make room for new backups?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

\marc

[natew]

Hi

 

One thing that can happen:

Your catalog file is normally compressed. When the groom happens the catalog is uncompressed first. This can take up a bunch of space on the disk.

To work around it, move your catalog file to the internal hard drive and then double click it. Then try the groom.

 

Thanks

Nate

[mnc042]

But where is this work done, on the C: drive?

 

My C: drive is intentionally very small, about 40 gigs total.

 

I have about 35gigs free, although my catalogs must be getting pretty large. Can I tell Retrospect to do its scratch work on another volume?

 

I also seem to have completely lost my backup sets.. Retrospect will not rebuild the catalog, says they are corrupt. That's disappointing, I wouldn't expect a condition like being out of disk space to completely trash the backups I've been doing.

 

Anyway, thanks in advance.

 

\marc

[Mayoff]

35 GB free should be more then enough.

 

Where is the Windows temp directory?

[mnc042]

Windows temp is on c:\WINDOWS\TEMP, the same volume with 35 gigs free.

 

I suspect Retrospect had enough scratch space to do its work, but the volume that it was doing the work on exhausted its free space -- the one down to just over 2 gigs. Unfortunately, when it failed, it corrupted the catalog.

 

I'm going to try to re-do my backupsets -- start over -- but this time, instead of taking the default grooming policy, I'm going to have it groom to the last 10 backups. I think that should prevent it from running out of room again. Via the default policy, it seemed to have kept something like 25 backups total, stretching back to early February.

 

Although -- once again -- I thought Retrospect was supposed to automatically determine how much it could keep based on disk space. I'm really confused as to why the disk volume that the backup set is stored on, when it ran out of space, caused the exact condition that I wanted to avoid by turning on grooming.

 

If you had any thoughts on that and how I could use Retrospect in a more effective way, I'd really appreciate it. Now, I'm just kinda baffled.

 

Thanks for the help, everyone!

 

\marc