Grooming has no effect

[dbrodeur]

Grooming appears to run , but the log always reports "groomed 0kb", and no files are removed from the backup disk. I have set the grooming policy to save only the last two backups, and manually forgotten backups. Retrospect no longer displays the forgotten backups, but their files are still there. Can I manually delete files from the backup disk, or will that corrupt the backup set?

 

I'm running Retrospect 7.0.326, update 7.0.11.102 under Windows XP Home, on a home network with three computers. The backup drive is a 120GB Buffalo Linkstation attached to the network.

 

I wound up deleting the backup set and starting new one, but I'd prefer a less drastic maintenance procedure.

 

Thanks,

David

[nekr0phage]

Hi,

 

Deleting .rdb files from your backup set will result in the loss of useful data. If you have the catalog files for the backup sets stored on the Terrastation it is possible that would prohibit Retro from grooming properly.

[dbrodeur]

Pardon my disappearance; I got caught up in more immediate problems. Thanks for the suggestion, but the catalog file is on the host computer, not on the backup drive.

 

David

[nekr0phage]

Hi David,

 

You can manually groom snapshots by going to Configure>Backup Sets>Properties>Snapshots tab, right-click a snapshot and select "Forget." When you exit the properties for the backup set you should get a prompt that says something like "The Snapshot(s) you forgot will be groomed from the Backup Set to reclaim disk space. When do you want to groom?"

 

This should allow you to groom a snapshot even if you have fewer snapshots than would be removed via the grooming policy. Try this out and make sure you can groom something.

 

After rereading your first post: if you forget a backup set that will remove links to it from within Retrospect. You then need to manually delete the backup files and catalog file. You should do this if you no longer want that backup data for some reason or another, but not to resolve grooming issues.