Duplicate and Incremental backups

[Randyh]

(I have several unrelated questions which I am posting separately. Here is #2.) I am on trial for Retrospect Workgroup on a large, fast ME machine and have a client on an older XP machine and an iMac. I have spare, similarly sized disks in the Windows machines that I schedule for "duplication" too once a week. I want to do daily incremental backups of the main disks on each machine to two backup sets on the ME hard disks (which has the best speed and disk space) -- one on the main disk and the other on the spare, duplicated disk. This gives me a higher level of security and comfort as I have two different, bootable disks that are within 24 hours of being identical and current.

 

 

 

The problem is the spare disk gets overwritten with the duplication once a week. This wipes out the backup set on the spare disk and replaces it with the main backup set. Is there a way to automatically create a new backup set in a script (for the duplicate disk)? Any suggestions on another way to accomplish the goal of duplicate, bootable disks which each have a network backup set?

[AmyJ]

Duplicate your data to a folder (subvolume) on the destination drive, rather then to the root level of the drive. In this way, when the duplication runs, it will overwrite the contents of the folder, rather then the entire drive. The downside is the the disk is no longer bootable.

 

 

 

You can also try setting your duplication to "Replace Corresponding Files" rather then "Replace Entire Disk." Files that are not on the source drive will not be deleted from the destination drive. Ulitmately, this may leave your drive cluttered with many files you no longer need or want.

 

 

 

There is not a clean way to accomplish your goals. You may also want to consider partitioning your drive and having a separate partion devoted to your catalog files, which does not get overwritten by the duplicate.