msummers Posted August 16, 2006 Report Share Posted August 16, 2006 I have been using Retrospect since version 5, and have multiple gigabytes of backup files spread over two large disks. What's the best way to consolidate all of these files, free up space, and eliminate these many scheduled backup files to come away with a more compact set of backups? If possible, I'd like to move these files OFF of the disk I started with some years ago, onto a higher capacity one. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted August 17, 2006 Report Share Posted August 17, 2006 Hi Murray, What you'll probably want to do to consolidate these backups is create a new backup set on the new disk you want the backups to reside on in the future, then use Transfer Backup Sets from the Tools menu to move existing data into the new backup set. Any duplicated data between these backup sets will only need to be written once. Or, you could use the Transfer Snapshots option to move only recent snapshots from older backup sets. This further reduce the amount of data stored in the new backup set. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msummers Posted August 18, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 18, 2006 Thank you Foster. I'll give that a try! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msummers Posted August 21, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 21, 2006 Would it require > 4 days to do this transfer? I'm thinking something is wrong.... Maybe I'll stop it and just transfer snapshots as a faster alternative. What do you think? Then I can just burn the original backup sets to a CD - would that work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted August 21, 2006 Report Share Posted August 21, 2006 Hi Murray, I don't know how long this should take, how much data are you dealing with? Are we talking about terrabytes total? How did you connect the drives that you're transferring between? Yes, you can burn the .rdb files to cd, if you want to burn that many cd's. Just remember that if you ever need to get data out of the originals, they need to be placed back on a hard drive in the correct directory structure so that Retrospect will recognize them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msummers Posted August 21, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 21, 2006 I have the following setup - 1x200GB (FAT32) drive connected to the FW port on the computer (it's pretty full of backups) 1x200GB (FAT32) drive connected to a network storage link (it's not so full - maybe 50-70GB) 1x500GB (FAT32) drive connected to that same network storage link (it's pretty empty - other than the 195GB of stuff that was transferred when I stopped the process) I started the transfer on 8/18 in the morning. By about the same time today, this was as far as it had gotten. What do you think? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted August 21, 2006 Report Share Posted August 21, 2006 Murray, Are these all members of one backup set? Do you have any way of telling what the performance difference was between the backup data transferred from the local firewire drive and the network drives? What drive are you transferring this data to and how is it connected to the backup machine? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msummers Posted August 21, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 21, 2006 They are all members of one backup set, and my sense was that the FW drive was no faster than the USB/network one. They were transferring TO the 500GB drive - also USB hung on that network storage link. Murray Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted August 22, 2006 Report Share Posted August 22, 2006 Murray, Make sure the catalog file is stored on the Retrospect host machine. I hadn't thought of it until just now, but I have seen this cause performance drops in the past. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msummers Posted August 22, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 22, 2006 Yes, it is. I dunno - but I just cannot have my system hobbled for 4 days while it transfers these files.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted August 22, 2006 Report Share Posted August 22, 2006 Murray, I understand the transfer rate you are seeing is rather abysmal. You need to figure out where this transfer is being restricted. Think about when you were running the backup - did you ever see any delayed speeds like this when writing to the NAS device? Are you able to restore data in a reasonable amount of time? What speeds do you get if you hook the destination drive directly to the backup machine? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msummers Posted August 22, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 22, 2006 That's an idea. I'll see what happens there.... But - I'll need to wait until the weekend (when I don't do backups) to gain such big potential chunks of time. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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