Grooming and retention of older files

[Monafly]

RS 15.5.0 running disk backups on and older Mac mini. 

When a set is groomed to the RS defined policy (every day for the past week, every week for the past month and every month for the past year) what happens to a backup session when it is 13 months old? Does it get dropped from the backup file? I would expect this, but after grooming a disk set (manually, it's not set to do this automatically) that has gotten full and not recovering much space, I can't tell if these older files are gone or not. I'd hate to have to recycle a set to be sure that I've cleaned out all the old fluff (I do have a second set off site that periodically gets cycled back in) but may have to do a recycle to get current backups to run again. 

[Lennart_T]

I think you have misread the rules of the defined policy.

There is no mention of "past year", only "each previous month".

From the Retro Mac User Guide (My emphasis):

• Quote

  Groom to Retrospect defined policy: When the backup drive fills up, or when you run a scripted or manual groom operation, Retrospect uses its own grooming policy to delete old backups. At a minimum, Retrospect’s policy retains two backups for each source, saving the last backup of the day for each source from the two most recent days on which each source was backed up. Given enough space in the Media Set, Retrospect keeps a backup of each source for every day in the last week, a backup for each week in the last month, and a backup for each previous month.

   

[Lennart_T]

To avoid recycling, you can try this:

1. Set Retro to retain (say) the 15 last backups.

2. Perform a groom operation.

3. If not enough space was regained, repeat steps 1-2 with a lower value.

4. (Important) Set Retro back to the defined policy.

 

If all else fails, buy a larger hard drive, they are cheap nowadays.  

[DavidHertzberg]

Actually Monafly isn't misreading what he/she is reading in the Grooming dialog.  Retrospect Mac 12 added a Months to Keep entry box to the Grooming dialog, which is described on page 9 of the Retrospect Mac 12 User's Guide.  A quick test on my "backup server" shows that (as I expected for compatibility) clicking the Groom to Retrospect Defined Policy button causes Months to Keep to default to 12. 

Unfortunately that page was part of the "What's New" chapter, and the august Documentation Committee has adopted for the last 4 versions of the UGs a policy of totally overwriting the last version's "What's New" UG chapter with whatever is new in the current version of Retrospect—without copying the last version's "What's New" content to another UG chapter.  I have mentioned that policy in other posts; a frank appraisal of it would require me to use the words "heads" and "wedged" and "up" and the third-person plural possessive of the name of the human excretory orifice, which of course I'm too polite to do.

[Monafly]

Lennart: thanks for that suggestion. There was one disk sent where this was appropriate and it did clear out enough space to continue until I can get the off-site set back on-line and/or purchase additional storage. 

I admit being a bit cryptic, as what David noted about the default being 12 is what I meant by '...past year'.