Report for users prior to Archive job

[BillIrwin]

I would like to start running Archive jobs to move old large files into an archive, rather than waiting for users to clean up their areas. I'd like to run a job first that uses the same selector, but doesn't delete the files. Then I'd like to be able to send to each user (hopefully by e-mail) a list of their files that have been selected for archiving in the near future. This will give the users a chance to review their old large files and delete the ones they don't need and resave (to update the modify date) the ones they want to keep available. It would be nice to be able to select by access date so that files that are used regularly, but not modified, are not deemed old.

 

The only report I've been able to find is from the session browser, but it doesn't expand all the folders so that the file names are visible. I can't find a way to do this other than manually expanding each folder.

 

Also, the report mimicks the column widths that are in the browser, which causes truncation and makes some file names unavailable. Is there not some way of generating a report of all the files that are contained in a session without having to produce a custom version for each user?

 

I tried to select an Acrobat printer so that the report would be made a PDF and e-mailed, but on two different computers this caused a complete freeze that required a power-cycle to restart the servers. It seems that Retrospect 7.0.326 does not like an Acrobat print driver.

 

I can live with paper reports if there's no other way to do it, but I'd sure like to find an easier way to display all the file names. Selecting a parent folder in the browser and a right click to select a print option that would expand all subfolders and wrap long paths so that no data is truncated, would be very convenient ... but likely not currently available.

 

Has anyone found a good way to do this?

 

Bill

[natew]

Hi

 

It sounds like you are looking for an information lifecycle management scheme. Retrospect isn't really designed for this on its own. You can't greate a list of files that would be archived.

 

There are other EMC products like VisualSRM that can do this kind of thing. I believe DiskExtender will also do it. The cool thing about these products is it removes the files from high priority storage to a low priority storage volume. It then leaves a link to the file so that the user can still open it.

 

Thanks

Nate

[BillIrwin]

Hi nate:

 

I'm not trying to get a report of files that would be archived, although that would be convenient. I want a report of what was backed up. I just want to be able to generate a list of files without having to manually expand every folder and adjust column widths so that paths don't get truncated. Is there a way to do this?

 

Have you had any reports of Retrospect not being able to print to an Acrobat driver? Having the same thing happen (complete system freeze) on two different computers tells me that there's an issue with these two software products.

 

Bill