Backup my Backup Set

[randlarson]

I recently had to spend quite a bit of time rebuilding my backup catalog when my system crashed while Retrospect was working. This gave me an idea. What if I backup my backup catalog every day. And if I make a fresh copy of this backup so that if the catalog is corrupted, I can go back to the one that is good and replace it. Would that work? I'm assuming it would. But now I'm stumped: how can I make a Script that will backup my backup catalog every day, but make a new copy. I got an inexpensive 250GB drive for these "backups of backups" to reside in, so I'm wanting to do a removable drive backup. But I don't want it to erase every day. How do I do this? Any help? I feel quite dumb since I'm a long-time Retrospect user....

 

[twickland]

Unless you need to span multiple external drives, it's probably best not to use a removable drive backup. Use a file backup or duplicate instead.

 

 

 

You probably don't need to back up your catalog every day. You can restore a fairly-recent catalog and use Update Existing to add the latest files to the catalog, which is a lot faster than a complete rebuild.

 

 

 

We back up our catalogs weekly to the same three backup sets we use for all our files, as part of our normal nightly backup script (we use a selector to limit backups to catalog files that haven't been backed up in the previous 6 days). This only works if you have multiple backup set destinations, as you cannot back up the catalog of the backup set currently in use.

 

 

 

We also run a Duplicate script every couple of days to a different disk so we have a copy of the catalog immediately available without having to restore it.

 

 

 

We do the same for the Retro.Config files. (If you have a lot of scripts, custom selectors, or clients, it's nice not to have to recreate all these manually in case that file gets hosed.)

 

 

 

If you just want to run a Duplicate script, you could create enough folders on the disk to accommodate the depth of the catalog history you wish to preserve. Using these folders as subvolumes, you would then create a scheduler in your script to duplicate to each folder in turn.