Guest Posted May 16, 2006 Report Share Posted May 16, 2006 Greetings, I have a small problem organizing a proper and reliable recycling backup. The general strategy is the following: One backupset with one tape per workday. Data is appended to the set/tape every week for 3 weeks. For each set every three weeks a recycling backup is sheduled. The problem starts when a customer forgets to put in a tape on sheduled recycling backup days. That is resulting at the moment, in normal backups beeing appending data to the non recycled set. And that leads to a full tape, that has to be recycled manually. Now my question: How can I tell retrospect to reexecute the recycling backup one week later, if it was skipped on the previous week? Regards, Lars Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David777 Posted May 17, 2006 Report Share Posted May 17, 2006 Hello. What version of Retrospect are you using? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted June 8, 2006 Report Share Posted June 8, 2006 Hi Lars, The schedulers in Retrospect are fairly rigid. There will be no way to set up a backup to recycle *if* it did not recycle previously. However, if the backup media is not present, a manual recycle can be performed by going to Configure>Backup Sets, right-click on the backup set and select 'recycle.' This is assuming you are using Retrospect on a Windows machine. There is an override command for media which you can set on the Options tab of the backup set properties window. This would allow you to have that particular backup set take a particular action regardless of the next scheduled action. However, this option sticks so you would need to toggle it off and on regularly which would be more troublesome than the occasional manual recycle. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 9, 2006 Report Share Posted June 9, 2006 Quote: The schedulers in Retrospect are fairly rigid. There will be no way to set up a backup to recycle *if* it did not recycle previously. However, if the backup media is not present, a manual recycle can be performed by going to Configure>Backup Sets, right-click on the backup set and select 'recycle.' This is assuming you are using Retrospect on a Windows machine. Thanks for the answer. My god, has any one at retrospect ever had contact with a normal small business customer that is not using a tape robot? It can't be that an it technican has to visit them every time they forgot to put in a tape at a certain time???? Regards, Lars Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted June 13, 2006 Report Share Posted June 13, 2006 Lars, Don't let all the fancy terminology intimidate you. With Retrospect open you can have a backup set recycled with just 4 mouse clicks. Also, you don't have to insert the tape at an exact point during the backup procedure. Schedule your backups to run in the middle of the night and make it a habit to change tapes first thing in the morning or just before you leave at night. It's not a particularly difficult program, it just takes a while to get used to the interface. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 6, 2006 Report Share Posted July 6, 2006 Quote: Don't let all the fancy terminology intimidate you. With Retrospect open you can have a backup set recycled with just 4 mouse clicks. I don't have a problem with the handling of the Retrospect. My customers have. Most of them need a sollution that requires NO interaction with the actual software, beside checking the report emails. If every thing goes wrong, they call me anyways. Quote: Also, you don't have to insert the tape at an exact point during the backup procedure. Schedule your backups to run in the middle of the night and make it a habit to change tapes first thing in the morning or just before you leave at night. It's not a particularly difficult program, it just takes a while to get used to the interface. But any concept that is not overwriting the tapes any time they are inserted, will fail if a day gets skipped, that would have done a recycling backup. And as there are hollidays frome time to time, this will happen. Also tend customers to forget the changing of the media some times. What I need (or more, what my customers need), is a as fail save as possible solution, where the customer interaction with the software is minimaliced. And to implement this, Retrospect badly needs a option, to "repeat" a recycling backup for a certain tape, when this was skipped. Regards, Lars Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted July 6, 2006 Report Share Posted July 6, 2006 Given what your requirements seem to be, an autoloader is the only solution. Get one. Russ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 Quote: Given what your requirements seem to be, an autoloader is the only solution. Get one. So I go to every one of my customers wo happens to use Retrospect and say "Well, seems like you need to get an auto loader for some 1000 Euros, because the backup software is lacking some simple configuration options." I better go checking for a backup software that happens to work without auoloader. Regards, Lars Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted July 12, 2006 Report Share Posted July 12, 2006 Quote: I better go checking for a backup software that happens to work without auoloader. Again, it's your stated requirements (auto switching of tapes when the user forgets to change media) that necessitate an autoloader. Good luck in your search. Autoloaders are not expensive. Exabyte has 1u VXA drives with a 10 slot autoloader (VXA-172 PacketLoader) for less than USD $1670 (1308 Euros) at various online resellers, field upgradable to double capacity by entry of a license code as their backup needs increase. If your clients' data is not worth that, or if it's not worth monitoring changing tapes as needed, well, they ought to reconsider whether it's worth doing backups. Russ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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