I thought I was grooming....

[Steve3]

.... but I'm not.

 

I have a disk to disk backup that just grabs the Entourage folders on my clients. I have the groom policy set to only keep the last 2 snapshots, and if I browse snapshots, I see exactly what I expect.

 

What isn't working as I expect is if I Configure: Backup Sets: Entourage Databases: Properties: Sessions, I can open that session, navigate through was was backed up, and right click-> Retrieve and get the file back.

 

Since I'm backing up the Entourage database, the file is "different" than the last backup, and therefore backed up on each run. Therefore, this now superceeded file shouldn't be needed to restore the most recent 2 snapshots: it's been updated with a newer version. I was expecting it to get groomed out the next time a groom occurs.

 

So why is it still here? Am I not using the groom feature properly?

 

Many thanks,

Steve3

[Lennart_T]

Retrospect doesn't actually groom on its own until the backup set reaches the max size you have set.

 

You can schedule a groom script. We run a groom script every weekend.

[Steve3]

It's reached the maximum size many times, tried to groom, and gave me the "I still need more space" dialog, so I've added more disk destinations to it, and grew the limits of members at other times. It's taking up 1.5TB over both DAS and NAS storage now (which is much more than the sum of my Entourage databases x 2). I also have done manual and scheduled grooms.

 

The data isn't purging. The snapshots are being removed, but I can still pull the data back by browsing sessions that go back much, much farther than the last 2 snapshots.

[Steve3]

FWIW, I decided to archive the most recent snapshot of the backup set to a new set, and then recycle. I got my space back.... just hoping I don't have to do this periodically.