x509 Posted October 6, 2014 Report Share Posted October 6, 2014 I've started to groom older datasets to recover disk space. I'm doing 2009 and 2010 for now. I don't know which version of Retrospect I was using at the time, but I know that it was at least 6.X. After I set up the options to groom a dataset, Retrospect asks me for the location of dataset members. Sometimes Retrospect does find the members, but usually I get these messages in the log": Groomed zero KB from Backup Set 2010-04 TransactData. Grooming Backup Set 2010-04 TransactData failed, error -1101 ( file/directory not found) You must recreate the Backup Set's Catalog File. Because Retrospect sometimes found the backup set members, I must have done some "magic sequence" but I can't remember what it was. Any suggestions, or is my only choice to recreate the catalog each time (for 9 different backup datasets)? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted October 7, 2014 Report Share Posted October 7, 2014 "to recover disk space"? Disk space has never been so cheap as it is now, so why do you want to spend your valuable time on this? If you really want to spend your time on this, make sure you use the same version for grooming as you did for backups. If you get the mentioned error message, your only option is to recreate the catalog file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
x509 Posted October 8, 2014 Author Report Share Posted October 8, 2014 "to recover disk space"? Disk space has never been so cheap as it is now, so why do you want to spend your valuable time on this? If you really want to spend your time on this, make sure you use the same version for grooming as you did for backups. If you get the mentioned error message, your only option is to recreate the catalog file. It's not the cost of the disk drive in dollars. My real "cost" is in shelf space in my closet and the limited space in my safe deposit box for an "all years" offsite backup. I'm a home user, not a business. Are you sure that I need to recreate the catalog file for any backups made with a prior version of Retrospect? If this is true, it sounds like poor system design. Can anyone else comment? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted October 8, 2014 Report Share Posted October 8, 2014 Are you sure that I need to recreate the catalog file for any backups made with a prior version of Retrospect? That is not what I wrote. I wrote: "If you get the mentioned error message, your only option is to recreate the catalog file." I see what you mean. I have stacks of old CDs and DVDs taking up a lot of shelf space in my self storage. I don't know what to do about them. (I also have hard drives, but they don't use nearly as much space, so I will just keep them.) With grooming you lose the oldest backups, which may or may not be what you want. Maybe you can try this instead of grooming: Buy one 3TB disk. That size is probably the most cost effective per GB. Copy the contents of older (smaller) drives into the new one (to separate folders). Then recreate the catalog file(s) from the backup set(s) you copied to the drive. Once verified it works (you have access to all snapshots), you have successfully replaced some drives with one larger. You could also try to create a new backup set on the new 3TB disk (see above). Then transfer the contents of the old backup sets to the new one. You can transfer the latest snapshot for each source, selected snapshots or all snapshots. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
x509 Posted October 9, 2014 Author Report Share Posted October 9, 2014 That is not what I wrote. I wrote: "If you get the mentioned error message, your only option is to recreate the catalog file." I see what you mean. I have stacks of old CDs and DVDs taking up a lot of shelf space in my self storage. I don't know what to do about them. (I also have hard drives, but they don't use nearly as much space, so I will just keep them.) With grooming you lose the oldest backups, which may or may not be what you want. Maybe you can try this instead of grooming: Buy one 3TB disk. That size is probably the most cost effective per GB. Copy the contents of older (smaller) drives into the new one (to separate folders). Then recreate the catalog file(s) from the backup set(s) you copied to the drive. Once verified it works (you have access to all snapshots), you have successfully replaced some drives with one larger. You could also try to create a new backup set on the new 3TB disk (see above). Then transfer the contents of the old backup sets to the new one. You can transfer the latest snapshot for each source, selected snapshots or all snapshots. Lennart, A few months ago, I bought a 4 TB drive (Hitachi) for my 2014 year backups. For other years, I have a collection of 1 and 2 TB drives. I am hoping that with judicious grooming of same year backups, I can manage with a 2 TB drive. I back up different kinds of data into a yearly, quarterly, or monthly dataset. For older sets, all I realloy want to keep is the last snapshot. So rather than grooming all those datasets, I think I will do a snapshot transfer into the yearly dataset for each year. I know that's a workaround, but it could be an effective workaround. To your initial point, I have gotten error messages for almost every single datatset from 2009 and 2010. x509 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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