Advice on grooming

[Lennart_T]

Using Retrospect 7.0, we recently started using disk backup sets with grooming. (And, yes, we do transfer them to tape).

 

It isn't clear in the manual when grooming occurs. (And not in the disk-to-disk-to-tape white paper for that matter).

On the one hand it says that grooming occurs when the files grow larger than the allotted maximum.

On the other hand, the limit is set to 10 snapshots.

 

So is the set automatically groomed when the 11th snapshot is to be added?

Or only when the size is exceeding the allotted max?

 

And what is the purpose of the "groom" script? There are no options, except schedule. Will it groom only when the size exceeds the limit? Or when there are 11 or more snapshots, regardless of total size?

[AndrewA]

Typically the way grooming works is it will not groom until it needs more space. Even if you have it set to 10 snapshots it will not automatically groom after the 11th backup and will wait until it fills the entire disk. The point of the groom script is to have Retrospect groom before the disk becomes full. So if you have 15 snapshots when the grooming script occurs then afterwards you will have 10 snapshots. Another thing to mention when it says keep 10 snapshots it means 10 snapshots for each source so if you are backing up 2 drives after grooming you will have 20 snapshots total.

 

Also if you are using 7.0 I would highly recommend that you make sure that you are using 7.0.12.105 RDU since that fixed some issues with grooming. You will have to rebuild your catalog after this update.

[Lennart_T]

Thank you very much. Your reply was very clear.

 

Yes, we keep ourselves updated and have used the 7.0.12.105 RDU almost since it came out.