Deleted from Source - not deleted in destination

[costasppc]

Hello everyone

Iam evaluating v 6.1.230 for Macintosh for a client who wants to backup 5 Macintosh wstations to a Windows 2003 File Server share. Each station has 50 GB of data. The client wants to have a single file backup, like NTBackup does.

1. During evaluation, Ive noticed that when I delete some files from the source folder they are not deleted from the destination backup set. How can I do that?

2. How big can a Backup Set can be?

 

Thanks

Kostas

[CallMeDave]

when I delete some files from the source folder they are not deleted from the destination backup set

 

Assuming that you are backing up to a File Backup Set, then this is a design feature. And a very good feature, too.

 

Imagine your client, at the end of the day, has mistakenly and unknowingly deleted a Very Important File. The next morning, when she realizes that the file is gone, do you want to be the one to tell her that "sorry, since the backup ran overnight your file is gone forever," or would you rather tell her "no problem, the backup contains all the previous versions of your Very Important File."

 

> How big can a Backup Set can be

Measured in terabytes, although the number of files can be a limiting factor in how Retrospect behaves. Depending on the sizes of files being used, a 50 GB source can be good for months and months of incremental backups before the Backup Sets might need to be Recycled.

[costasppc]

Thanks for the quick answer.

Although the File Backup Set feature to not delete the source-deleted files is good, can it be a problem when:

 

a. the client is confused about the old versions of the files

 

b. the client just wants his source-deleted files to be deleted from the destination too.

 

c. Disk size issues will occur, since the client deletes files -and has more free space- from his workstation, but not from the destination shared volume?

[CallMeDave]

> can it be a problem when:

 

> the client is confused about the old versions of the files

 

Retrospect is a powerful application that can be confusing. One would assume that a backup administrator would have an understanding of how the application works. Since the individual client machines don't do Restores directly, the person in charge of the machine running Retrospect would be responsible for Restore operations. If you want drop dead easy (but less powerful/flexible/configurable) you can throw a USB drive on each machine and use Time Machine instead. Or try a Time Capsule, which also won't delete deleted files each time, but will automatically discard older backups as the disk fills up.

 

> the client just wants his source-deleted files to be deleted from the destination too.

Why would he care? But if that's what he wants, then no, Retrospect will not delete un-matched files from a Backup Set.

 

> Disk size issues will occur, since the client deletes files -and has more

> free space- from his workstation, but not from the destination shared volume?

Sure, if the volume holding your File Backup Set(s) isn't large enough, then it can be a problem. The solution is to have adequate storage size.

 

Understand that Retrospect, by default, will Match files across multiple Sources. So if each of the 5 machines share a lot of the exact same files (say standard documents, clip art, etc) then Retrospect will only store a single instance on the media. When it comes time to Restore, Retrospect's Snapshot technology will keep track of what files are on what machines.

[costasppc]

ΟΚ then thanks very much for your time.

 

Kostas Backas