How can I schedule a recycle

[TERRYRICKETTS]

Ever since upgrading to Version 8 we have been plagued with Retrospect crashes while grooming. These crashes cause data corruption in both the data sets and the catalogs. It has become so frustrating that we have decided to not allow grooming any more until the problem is fixed.

 

But this means that we need to do something about limiting the growth of the backup sets, since they are all stored on a large NAS disk array. Since we replicate the data between two NAS systems we thought we could simply recycle the backup sets every few weeks, relying on the replicated copy should someone need recent data.

 

But Retrospect does not seem to have a way to schedule a script to recycle a backup set on a regular basis. We have too many backup sets to try to handle this procedure manually (although the problem with grooming is forcing us to do it manually anyway).

 

Does anyone know of a way to schedule a recycle of backup sets, either within Retrospect or from some external program?

[aesmith]

Do you get an assert when it crashes? Any error messages? I don't have any solutions just wondering if your problem is related to my current one.

 

I have always had issues with grooming and Retrospect but have lived with it (even in version 7.7). Seemed to cause corruption of catalog files. I also deal with big backups on a NAS but recycling them is not an option because they are active backups. To make the backups smaller I have divided them into logical groups like engineering, sales etc and even in some cases made them just specific users due to data sizes. This has helped with this corruption but it does still happen from time to time.

 

I don't know why you are moving forward to version 8 but for me the old version 7 did not work reliably on windows 7 or 8 so I needed to move on. I am currently evaluating 8 and if the problems are not resolved, backupexec will have to replace Retrospect. I don't really want to go this route though if I can help it.

 

To answer your question you can schedule a backup to recycle just when you schedule it, put in the action recycle.

[TERRYRICKETTS]

Thank you very much for the info on scheduling a recycle. I don't know why I had not noticed that option before.

 

We also breakup the backups into smaller units, both to keep them smaller, but also to allow us to run many at the same time. We have two servers, each doing about 10 backups at a time. This allows us to get through the large number of workstations in a reasonable time.

 

We did not have too many problems with 7.7, but the upgrade to 8.0 was a mess. We do all our grooming on weekends, and I was having to constantly babysit the servers because we were getting 8 to 10 crashes every weekend. There were assert errors and they were sent automatically off to Dantz. I am surprised they never called to ask what our problem was, cause we sent them a lot of those messages.

 

Because we have two NAS arrays and replicate between them often there will be no problem with recycling the backup sets once every other week. Should we need some data from before the recycle it can be recalled from the replica on the other NAS array. We plan to put the second array at another site about 10 miles away as an offsite backup; but at present it is in another building on site.

[Richy_Boy]

I very much doubt those automatic notifications on crashes go anywhere... if they do, Retrospect Inc must have thousands of them from my server alone!

 

We use Netgear ReadyNAS devices and had good success duplicating Retrospect backup sets across sites using the rSync over SSL feature.

 

Richard