Starting Over

[slscott99]

Hi - I'm new to this forum and new to Retrospect - using it for a few months now but I think I've made a bit of a mess and with to start over with a better strategy.

 

I have a home network with 3 machines. One machine is connected to a Maxtor external drive and that is what runs Retrospect for the other two client machines. The Maxtor Drive is partitioned evenly for each of the 3 machines.

 

First problem - the Retrospect Machine just ran out of hard drive space. When I looked I saw over 50MB of .rbc files in the Retrospect folder - many of them with the same dates. Are these catalogs ? - Should there be so many and should they be so large ? Should they stay on the Retro machine ?

 

Also, on the Maxtor Drive I ran out of space on one of the partitions quickly - there are 80MB there backing up a machine that is currently only using 30 MB. If it is only backing up "changed" files I can't imagine how it got filled up so fast. I have backups scheduled for each machine once weekly. Not a lot of changes or important data on these home comps !

 

Anyway - I'm thinking I want to purge everything and start all over again. Run the initial backups and configure everything correctly so that the space is manageable. I have a simple home network as I said without a lot of important data other than pictures and music files..I'm thinking a simple approach is all I need here.

 

Any advice ?. Let me say thanks in advance for your time and assistance.

 

SLS

[hmseiden]

You know some of the pitfalls by trial and error now. Backup planning requires some consideration of the following:

• How much total drive space will I be backing up of all the 'client' computers?

• What about the host machine's drive space?

• Type of backup drive? Space of the backup available?

• Multiple, alternating backup drives?

• How much, if any, of the OS- Windows/***ux/Mac- do I need to backup each time I run Retro?

• How often do I need to back up?

• How often to do a Full Backup, overwriting the old data? <-- I think that this may be your problem.

• Incremental or Full Backup? <-- I think that this may be your problem.

• What to do with expired data sets? Off line storage?

 

These are alot of questions to consider. I'm not being smug in making a long-ish, but by no means complete list here. Your answers may be simply no or don't care to most of them. I can't say- your system, your decision. Just giving you a base to start from, not a do this, do that list. You haven't lost any data at this point so starting over makes sense. Do it right this time. That's my advice in a single sentence!

 

As to what I do with my three computer networked system, the answer is quite a lot but extrememly unattended now that it's set up. I have two Macs- a desktop (the 'Server') and a laptop- and a Windows laptop. I use the feature called Retrospect Server on my version of Retro 6.1.126 for Mac. Similar features on other OS platforms are called different names and may work differently for you.

 

I back up the desktop to two daisy-chained, Firewire connected hard drives in separate cases and power supplies incrementally every night at 1:00AM. The backup drives alternate each day, seven days a week. One 300GB drive is erased every eight weeks prior to starting it's Full Backup. There is only one Daily Backup catalog on each drive. Right now, I have about 58GB of data stored on one of the drives and 56GB on the other, part way through their cycle. My entire OS is saved as well as all files, folders, settings, preferences, applications, fonts, etc. I figure that efficiently used drive space is better than my time spent figuring out where a file is.

 

The laptops are backed up weekly using Retrospect Backup Server- part of Retro for Mac. I had no idea how functional and easy it is until I heard about it on these forums. It manages the backups as the machines come on line and available at or after the backup time schedule I set up. When I come back from out of town with my laptop, for example, I simply leave it powered up and plugged in with the 100 base T data cable attached and wireless turned off. It is seen by the server and back up begins (at or after it's backup time). Same thing with my wife's laptop. The data is saved to the same redundant backup drives but as a different set of data. Same erase schedule (eight weeks) but by design the Full Backups take place at different times and the Server recognizes that the data doesn't match and begins it's backup after erasure to save the data again. That storage currently occupies 100+ GB of data and one catalog file on each drive.

 

Additionally, I recently began keeping a separate start up firewire drive (a 2.5", 80GB drive) with a generic boot OS to start any machine in the event that it's boot drive crashes with data recovery capability to recover from crashes. That drive lives in a drawer and is availble for emergencies. That drive was a free replacement from Hitachi to a 2.5" drive that failed in a laptop. I bought a new drive for that laptop quite a while ago and recently sold the laptop, but kept the spare drive.

 

Good luck with your planning. Let us know what you did!

[gemini70]

This is all good ...but I think I might be in the same boat after reading your post. How the heck did you setup your backups???? Me being new to Retro, your whole posts sounds like something out a French magazine. Can you explain how you set up your backup sets?