too large a database...what to do...

[dean echenberg]

I have been nitely backing up the entire contents of my disc (about 29 gigs)n onto a large second hard drive for over a year and I now find I have about 100 gigs of data....what do I do decrease this database without starting over...

[greg30808]

If all you want is a backup of what is currently on the disk, you could do a recycle backup.

[dean echenberg]

yes...

 

All I want is to save what is on my disk every night. I dont think there is an incremental choice on retrospect.

 

I am not sure about the recyle function. I have never used it...

[twickland]

By default, a "Normal" backup in Retrospect is an incremental backup. An incremental backup is a Good Thing because you can go back days, weeks, or months to get the file version you really want. The downside, as you've discovered, is that the file eventuallly gets to be too big.

 

You could edit your backup script to always perform a recycle backup instead of a normal backup, but I wouldn't recommend this. Instead, create a new script to run a recycle backup every X weeks or months to keep the size of the backup set under control.

 

Alternatively, whenever your backup set gets too big, go to Configure : Backup Sets: [highlight desired backup set] : Configure : Options : Media Action... and select "Recycle" to manually reset the backup set. All the old data in that one backup set will no longer be recoverable, but that won't matter because you have been following Dantz's advice to back up to multiple backup sets, haven't you?