How can I shrink a backup set?

[SReubart]

I'm using FireWire drives to back up my network, mostly for speed and not having to deal with tape problems. Recently I decided to purchase a number of 20GB FireWire drives that can hold a copy of each week's backups; those are sent to offsite storage for safekeeping.

 

 

 

I have about 24GB (after formatting) on each of the volumes that I back up to initially. The offsite drives are a little smaller--about 18GB after formatting. Recently I found that a week's worth of backups would fit into the 24GB space, but was somewhat larger than 18GB. So I have not been able to copy this backup set and its catalog for offsite storage.

 

 

 

Here's the real problem: I went in and deleted a couple of snapshots from the backup set, hoping that the file would now fit. It seems that this did not do any good--the backup set still takes up exactly the same amount of disk space, even though a good number of files have theoretically been deleted from it.

 

 

 

Is there any way to copy/transfer this backup set to another drive so that the set will "compact" itself to the proper size? I have a 30GB drive I can use for scratch space if necessary. I think I tried "Tools > Copy > Transfer" to copy the files to a different backup set, but if I recall it ended up being the exact same size as the set it came from.

 

 

 

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

 

[lv2ski]

If you were to transfer one set to another, it would be the same size.

 

 

 

You should do a Recycle backup. It will completly erase your backup and start the backup all over again, using less space than an incremtental backup over time.

 

 

 

Maybe that is what you want. I am not sure.

 

 

 

 

[SReubart]

No, I can't do that. The backup set I'm trying to copy was created several weeks ago, and that data has been changed since. Doing another backup would just copy the CURRENT data, not the stuff that was backed up in the past.

 

 

 

I'm really surprised to hear that doing a transfer from one set to another would create a backup set of the same size, when the original set has supposedly been reduced in content (and, logically, size) by the removal of three snapshots. I would expect the program to copy only the remaining snapshots, making the destination set smaller. Most things work that way--if you remove items from a folder and then copy the folder to another drive, the resulting folder takes up less space than the original before the items were removed.

 

 

 

But maybe I don't understand exactly what is stored in a snapshot. Perhaps deleting some of them wouldn't have solved the problem anyway.

 

 

[Mayoff]

Deleting the snapshot does not remove files from the backup set. The snapshot is just a picture of the most recent backup, but does not contain the files themselves.

 

 

 

The only way complete a transfer that is "smaller" then the original is to use the "selecting" criteria to only copy specific files based on date or other user selected criteria.

[SReubart]

That's just the info I was looking for. I'll give it a try. Thanks!!