glaviolette Posted November 13, 2002 Report Share Posted November 13, 2002 I was watching the backup server backup my own system and happened to notice file names I didn't recognize whiz by when it was creating the snapshot (which was taking FOREVER). My first thought is that is including the mapped drives as part of the snapshot. Is this true?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted November 14, 2002 Report Share Posted November 14, 2002 A snapshot is a picture taken of the _entire_ source. If you are currently backing up your C: drive, for example, the snapshot will include all files on the drive. The goal of the snapshot is to have a picture of the drive at the time of the backup in order to later provide the ability to restore the system back to that exact state. If you go to Configure > Backup Sets and get Properties for a given set, you'll see Snapshots and Sessions. A snapshot is a picture of the entire source, while a session is a listing of only the new and changed files backed up in the given session. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glaviolette Posted November 14, 2002 Author Report Share Posted November 14, 2002 Hmmm, that doesn't specifically answer my question... Now I know the difference between a snapshot and a session, and why I would want to have them. The closest answer I got was "the _entire _source", which unfortunately didn't help. I was looking for something like "The client only scans local physical drives only, the mapped drives are ignored", or something like that. Oh well... Well anyways, I did some further testing and discovered it doesn't... However (new topic), I did notice that it does indeed take a snapshot of the "_entire_source" and catalogs the whole folder structure , however I'm only backing up (as part of my selectors) a few specific folders. Why? The data backup can take 2 minutes, while the snapshot update can take 1+ HRS, multiply this by 40+ clients and this adds alot of time to my backups. I'm suspecting your answer will be to "provide the ability to restore the system back to that exact state", but how can this be done when I'm only backing up one folder? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted November 15, 2002 Report Share Posted November 15, 2002 Since you're backing up just some folders and therefore don't care about "the entire source state" how about turning *off* snapshots for that backup script? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glaviolette Posted November 15, 2002 Author Report Share Posted November 15, 2002 I don't believe I would want to do that, since if I needed to restore, all I would have is a "flat" file list (Page 215), no hierarchy. Yeah, I would have the data but I would hate to give it to a user that lost their data, "Here you go Bob, now you can spend day figuring out what folders they were in. Later!" [Rant mode on] It seems like a simple thing, doesn't it? Backup these files with their associated folders, and don't spend time on anything else! I believe MS Backup does this SIMPLE task and it even restores them with their NTFS permssioning without taking forever... [Rant mode off] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted November 18, 2002 Report Share Posted November 18, 2002 Try using Subvolumes on the clients, rather then using a Selector to find the few folders you want. The following tutorial is from Retrospect 6.0, however, the basic steps are the same for 6.0 and clients: http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=27527 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glaviolette Posted November 18, 2002 Author Report Share Posted November 18, 2002 Yeah, I had a discovered that "feature" and thought it might workaround the problem as some of the selectors I have are static in location, however other selectors are not. For example I backup My Documents and Favorites which are (At least in 2000) located in the Documents and Settings folder, however I also have other selectors like Projects, Databases and Resources which users could have anywhere on their drive. So I believe Subvolumes would narrow my search too much and could potentially miss data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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