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Incremental Backups Not?


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I've noticed with a few Retrospect systems I admin an odd thing with incremental backups.

 

If I store the same file (same creation & mod date, same name etc.) on two different systems it will get backed up both times. Also, last night I moved all my server data to a new set of mirrored drives. I didn't change the name of the share points, but now Retrospect is wanting to backup everything new. It's as though Retrospect thinks all the data has changed.

 

In the OS 9 days these instances would not have triggered Retrospect to think the files were new or modified, but now it does.

 

Is there something I can change to prevent this?

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Do you happen to have "Match only same location" checked for "Options > Matching" on your backup script? That causes the file location to be considered when matching files. If the volume has changed (as it has in your case, by moving to a new volume), the location has changed even if the volumes have the same name.

 

I've got that set for us (for our own reasons) and I see Retrospect back up the entire OS volume if I, for example, have to rebuild the RAID (had to do it recently for reasons unrelated to Retrospect).

 

Russ

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Ok, how did you do the "last night I moved all my server data to a new set of mirrored drives." ? Is it possible that the owner or some of the metadata info (date/time) changed? Are you using ACLs?

 

The RAID rebuild of our OS volume that I did was done using SuperDuper! on a quiescent disk (not being used) to another quiescent disk. And Retrospect did the full backup of all files on the next incremental even though the resulting RAID set was on the same device, same name. Now, admittedly, in our case, the volume size shrank slightly because the partition map enlarged a bit (Apple is getting ready for Leopard on new volume initialization), so Retrospect would have seen it as a slightly smaller volume.

 

See this thread here in the forums for what seems to be a similar discussion with head scratching:

Why copying existing files?

 

Russ

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