Trevorc Posted September 24, 2007 Report Share Posted September 24, 2007 Gents, I hope you can help me with my backup problem. I am a novice Retrospect user, and am outside the 1 month free support offered by emc (nice to see they look after their customers!) My back up - I am currently backing up about 70gb of data to a 250gb external hard drive with the back up scrpt being called "1-backup SetA" It has been set up to keep the last 10 versions of each file on normal back up mode. The back up has been working fine, and quickly also. The problem i have is that the back up external disk is now full. I had at this point expected the back up software to delete the older versions where appropriate and instead of keeping the last 10 keep the last 5. Instead the back up fails to find the media and instead of looking for "1-backup Set A" is now looking for "2-backup Set A" Very Odd!!! I can appreciate that there must be a setting that i am no selecting. I know i can format the disk and back up again, but i dont want to do that every few weeks or month! Many thanks for your help in advance. Kind Regards Trevor Clatworthy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abakadabra Posted September 30, 2007 Report Share Posted September 30, 2007 Howdy Trevor; I have the same problem you have. I decided tp groom down from the last 10 to all but the last 3 backups but still have only 5mb of space left on a 250 gb drive and can't figure out how to free it up so I can continue to backup on this drive without having to essentially reformat it. I think the dialogue at the end of the grooming session said it removed about 23gb, but a directory of the hard drive says there is still only 5+mb free. I can find nothing in the manual or in the help pages to begin solve this problem. I even thought of defragging the backup drive, but there is not even enough space left to do that.??? ANY help will be appreciated by me as well. Thanks up front, Abakadabra Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted October 1, 2007 Report Share Posted October 1, 2007 Do the Retro backup directories show that those files are taking up all the space (e.g. 250GB). You're using Disk backup and not File Backup (no grooming in the later)? Are you running Norton/Symantec (etc.) that would try to *not* throw away old files? Can you empty the trash (right click => Empty Norton Protected Files as an example)? No messages in the logs indicating that grooming can't run (due to a damaged backup set, a backup set created with an older Retro or update patch, etc.)? You can resort to a recycle, but obviously something is wrong as grooming should do this for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted October 1, 2007 Report Share Posted October 1, 2007 Quote: back Up To Eternal Hard Disk Sure wish I could find one of those. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abakadabra Posted October 1, 2007 Report Share Posted October 1, 2007 Thanks. I checked the Retro backup directories and added up the #s and discovered that my grooming had deleted about 23gb. Then I did another XP Pro computer properties search which showed just 5.5 mb free. No Symantec any more. It made my system slow and blue screen crash about 100 times. I finally took it out and threw it away. No such messages....grooming had successful comments. I went down to the recycle bin where there was one shortcut I had deleted. I deleted that, went back and did another computer properties search, and, voila, it showed 23gb free space on the drive! Some glitch! Abakadabra Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted October 1, 2007 Report Share Posted October 1, 2007 Glad you're back on line. You're still not running with much headroom if you only have 23gb free on a 250gb HD (<10% free). One comment about removing Symantec/Norton. I've found that it doesn't always do a reliable job of removing those protected files even when the program is uninstalled. So even though you've deinstalled the program, it's possbile to end up with a large amount of wasted space in the Norton protected location. I'm not using their products on this PC to check, but I recall it being a hidden folder (or at least within a hidden folder--you can change your Folder Prefs to see those) with a name like "Norton Proected Files." I've recovered huge amounts of space by just throwing that away (and emptying the trash) on systems that used to have Norton/Sym installed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trevorc Posted March 25, 2008 Author Report Share Posted March 25, 2008 Gents, Thanks for all your posts, it has been quite a while since i have been on the forum. I should have got back sooner. I didnt find any resolution to this error to be honest i formatted the drive and moved on and have encountered the same problem again and just have re-formatted!!! Thanks for your help. Kind Regards Trevor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MRIS Posted March 25, 2008 Report Share Posted March 25, 2008 if you have a 250GB drive, and ONE backup set using it, try setting the maximum member size of that backup set to say 200GB instead. This gives retrospect 50GB of headroom within which to operate. For grooming, also make sure you have at least 10GB free on your C drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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