Help with setup

[hmblprogrammer]

Hey everyone,

 

I'm having a problem with retrospect, and I'm not sure if Retrospect can even do what I'm wanting, in which case I'd love suggestions for other solutions. I'm trying to accomplish the following:

 

I have two 120GB hard drives in my G4 file server, G and F. G is the primary drive and has about 90 GB of data that needs to be backed up. I want to save "snapshot style" backups of G to F, that is, I want to keep the past seven days worth of backups of G (or less than 7 if space does not allow). Compression would be ideal but not necessary.

 

The point is, I don't want the backups to take up seven times the space; that is, if there's a 1GB file that hasn't been modified all week, then it should only be stored on the backup drive (F) once. Thus all seven days should use a total 1 GB of space, not 7 GB.

 

I have accomplished this before on a linux system with rsync, and it's awesome. I end up with seven folders, each is a view of the data I need backed up from 1, 2, 3... 7 days ago.

 

However, rsyc just hangs mid backup for me on OS X, and so that has been useless.

 

With retrospect, I started by setting up one "backup set" on F, and telling retrospect to "normal" back up G to F every night. This accomplished what I wanted; snapshots were stored nightly but the space taken up was only the new files each night. The problem came when I reached the 8th day -- retrospect just kept saving more and more snapshots with no way to delete them individually. I could delete them all, but not just the oldest one. And eventually the backup drive filled up.

 

So I tried creating seven "backup sets" and nightly doing a "recycle backup" to the backup set for that day. That didn't accomplish the space saving features -- that is, the first backup ran great and produced a 56GB backup file. The second backup also produced a 56GB backup file, and then no more backups would run.

 

What am I doing wrong? TIA!

[waltr]

hi hmbl,

 

my best advice for you would be this:

 

1) create 2 backup sets, week1 and week2

2) first week, full backup to week1->then normal backups the rest of the week to week1

3) second week, full backup to week2->then normal backups the rest of the week to week2

4) third week, recycle (full backup) to week1->normal backups the rest of the week to week1

5) fourth week, recycle (full backup) to week2->normal backups the rest of the week to week2

etc....(ad infinitum)

 

you are still going to use double the disk space, there's no getting around that. but now you have at least 7, and up to 14, good backups that follow your working pattern. and only 2 are full.

 

it's not exactly what you want, but i think that's as close as you'll get with the current version of Retrospect for Macintosh.

[hmblprogrammer]

waltr,

 

Thanks for the advice. I may try that. It's hard to believe that there isn't a better solution... But I figured there wasn't, I've played with the setup so many time I was really sure I didn't miss anything...