Grooming options?

[Don Lee]

I have been playing with grooming, and became interested in the difference between "performance-optimized" and "storage optimized" grooming. What's the difference - exactly?

I looked in the documentation, and found that the main docs are here:

https://www.retrospect.com/en/support/kb/grooming-tips-and-troubleshooting

Unfortunately, the first item on that page is:

"1. Choose your grooming mode: "Performance-optimized grooming" or "Storage-optimized grooming". See Documentation for more details."

Note that the "Documentation" link goes to a page that says not a word about grooming.

Where is the answer to my question? Is the difference between "performance" and "storage" optimized grooming described anywhere?

Thanks,

 

[DavidHertzberg]

The answer is that the difference was described on page 14 of the Retrospect Mac 13 User's Guide.  Unfortunately the information about the grooming options, along with all the glorious additional features of Retrospect Cloud storage on pages 6-14 and the capability of moving the member folders of disk sets to new locations, never made it out of the "What's New" chapter where it was originally described.  Instead that information was completely over-written by the UG "What's New" information for Retrospect Mac 14 (and Retrospect Windows 12).

DovidBenAvraham noticed this "documentation problem" when writing the original version of the Wikipedia article.  However his mention in the "Documentation" section of the article had to be deleted for reasons described in the second paragraph of this post.  I filed a Support Case about this, specifying where to move the information to other chapters in future UGs, and was told that Retrospect Inc. intends to rewrite the User's Guides.  I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

P.S.: What I described in the first paragraph as "all the glorious additional features of Retrospect Cloud storage", namely Seeding for Cloud Storage and Large Scale Recovery for Cloud Storage, were relegated to a 2-minute YouTube video narrated by the head of Retrospect Technical Support.  That video is only linked to, as "Changing paths Cloud Mac", under the Mac Cloud sub-section of the Tutorials page.  IMHO without a written description it's unlikely that any administrator would find the video unless he/she already knew the features existed—and probably not even then if he/she were a Windows rather than a Mac administrator—unless he/she read this subsection of the former Wikipedia "Enterprise client-server backup" article where DBA put in a referenced mention.

P.P.S.: IIRC, writing the Support Case specifying where to move the information to other chapters in future UGs took me about 3.5 hours.  IMHO that means actually moving the information would have taken about 3 hours for both variants of the UG, given that it was done by someone with a passing familiarity with whatever desktop publishing program (possibly MS Word) is used to maintain them.  A woefully heavy task for Retrospect Inc. !

P.P.P.S.: What I said above for the contents of the "What's New" chapter of the Retrospect 13 Mac UG is also true for the contents of the the "What's New" chapter of the Retrospect 12 Mac UG.  In that case, the only piece of information of permanent significance that was over-written is the "new grooming option [that] allows you to determine the number of months of backups to keep. This setting enables you to comply with regulations that require long term data retention for business [my emphasis], while ensuring older and duplicate files are removed from the backup set."  The meaning of that option is self-evident to any administrator who looks at the actual Grooming options dialog; however any potential Retrospect administrator wouldn't know from the Mac 14 or Windows 12 UG that the option exists unless he/she has read this subsection of the former Wikipedia "Enterprise client-server backup" article—where DBA managed to sneak in a mention of it.

P.P.P.P.S.:  Oops, in the first paragraph of this post I left out another over-written capability in Retrospect Mac 13 (and Retrospect Windows 11)— that of moving the member folders of disk sets to new locations.  Don Lee himself caught that one here.  I've fixed the first paragraph.