Hard Drive Backup Strategy

[ebatte]

How can a comprehensive backup strategy be handled using hard drives as the backup media? What I mean is if I have several LARGE CAPACITY (120GB) external drives I can fit several backup sets (files) on each drive...will Retrospect automatically delete older sets from the drive or does it have to be handled manually. I'm sure it's not manually when you use tapes (at least in other software I have always been prompted to overwrite, or the media had timed overwrite protection).

 

 

 

Can anyone fill me in on how this works with Retrospect?

 

 

 

thanks

 

Eric

[lv2ski]

You can do it manually or you can do a recycle backup that will erase them and then backup. This is up to you. There is no right or wrong way of doing a File Backup to a Hard Drive.

 

 

 

 

 

Retrospect is able to make use of space available on external USB, FireWire, SCSI, or IDE hard drives for backup. Once the drive can be accessed within Windows Explorer it can be used as a backup destination. The external hard drive will not show up in Configure > Devices.

 

 

 

To use a hard drive for backup, you have two options: either back up to a file backup set stored on the hard drive or do a duplicate of your source hard drive to your backup hard drive.

 

 

 

File Backup Sets

 

 

 

A file backup set is a single file which contains all the files you have backed up, and that can be stored on any random access device. Like tape or removable disk backup sets, you do incremental backups to it and it supports software data compression. The drawback to a file backup set stored on a hard drive is that hard drives are not removable media and cannot easily be stored off-site for safe-keeping. USB or IEEE 1394 (Firewire) drives that are hot-swappable offer greater flexibility in this. Incorporating more than one backup drive allows for true media rotation, increasing the security of your backup strategy.

 

 

 

File backup sets are limited to the maximum file size allowed by the file system used to format the disk:

 

 

 

o FAT: 2 GB

 

o FAT32: 4 GB

 

o NTFS: 1 TB

 

 

 

To do a backup to a file backup set, choose "Create New" from within Configure>Backup Sets. From within the backup set creation window, set the "Storage Type" to "File". Name the backup set, click New, and save it on your destination hard drive. When doing your immediate or scheduled backup, select the newly created backup set as your destination.