Question about daily backups via Firewire hard drive

[noiseordinance]

Hi there,

 

I am running OSX Server 10.4.11 with Retrospect 6.1.15.101. We had a VXA2 tape backup system that has had major hardware failures so I'm changing the way our server gets backed up. Additionally, the person who set us up no longer works for us so I'm kinda jumping in to make this thing work. Here's what I wanted to do, and am sorta curious about pointers:

 

I have (2) 500GB Firewire Hard Drives that I'd like to set up to do nightly incremental backups of the entire server, Monday-Friday afterhours. I'd like to switch hard drives weekly, allowing the spare to be placed in a fire safe.

 

I'm not sure how to set up this configuration. If I'm just using one drive, it seems fairly simple (create a script, make it a file, store the Monday-Friday catalog of the server on the single hard drive, let'r rip) but how to impliment drive swapping every week is beyond me. This seems like a best-practice scenario, right?

 

Thanks for any pointers. Maybe someone could direct me to a forum thread that addresses this, as I can't seem to find one.

[Lennart_T]

You need multiple schedules.

 

When creating a schedule, select "Repeating Interval". Then "Repeat every 2 weeks on Monday".

 

When creating a schedule, select "Repeating Interval". Then "Repeat every 2 weeks on Tuesday".

 

Until Friday for Disk 1.

 

Then repeat for Disk 2, but start one week later.

[noiseordinance]

I don't see how to perform this bi-weekly scheduling that you mentioned? This is all I see in my scheduling screen:

 

 

Sorry, I'm sorta lost here.

[CallMeDave]

I'm just using one drive, it seems fairly simple (create a script, make it a file, store the Monday-Friday catalog of the server on the single hard drive, let'r rip) but how to impliment drive swapping every week is beyond me.

 

It's almost just as simple.

(note: you store the File Backup Set on the drive, not "the catalog of the server")

 

- Create your first File Backup Set, save it to your first hard drive

- Create your second File Backup Set, save it to your second hard drive

- Create your script: Source=YourServer, Destination=First & Second File Backup Sets

- Create schedules that do backups to either/each/both of your Destinations whenever you see fit (as Lennart suggests).

[noiseordinance]

Aww, man, I'm lost now. When you say "store the File Backup Set on the drive, not the catalog of the server", what do you mean? I've done a simple backup once and discovered it makes a backup file and a catalog file.... does the catalog file stay on the OSX server in the directory of my choice, and the actual backup itself goes onto the firewire drive?

 

Is there a good tutorial on this software that you guys can recommend? I hate being a nuisance, I just haven't stepped outside of the boundaries of the few tutorials that are automatically stored in the retroscpect directory, none of which seems to do what I'm looking to do...

 

Thanks for any help guys!!

[CallMeDave]

When you say "store the File Backup Set on the drive, not the catalog of the server", what do you mean?

 

I mean to guide you into being precise with your terminology.

 

Backup Sets in Retrospect are comprised of catalogs and data. In the original days, a File Backup Set was unique in that it managed both of these in a single file. But as backups began to require more and more files (a requirement amplified by OS X), storing the catalog information in the resource fork of the data file became impossible.

 

So today, a File Backup Set is composed of two parts, foo and foo.cat. But _both_ of these files need to be in the same place! So if you say "I store the catalog on drive A" it omits the fact that you are storing both the catalog _and_ the actual data on drive A.

 

If this were a Tape Backup Set, then you would store the catalog in a different physical volume then where the actual data is kept. You're doing the right thing; I'm just encouraging to say it the right way.

 

Dave

[noiseordinance]

Ok, I understand now. Yeah, I am storing both files in the same place: On the firewire backup drive. But I guess another question has popped up. I'm on the retrospect site right now and there's a .swf tutorial on 2 week rotation to HD and it looks fairly helpful; however, when it gets to the scheduling portion, the scheduler looks different than what I'm seeing. Just to make sure I've done the update correctly, all I need to do is simply *place* the update file in the retrospect directory in place of the previous update file and then simply launch retrospect, yes? I'm just trying to get on the same track as tutorials I'm seeing...

[noiseordinance]

Ok, I figured out why I wasn't getting the same schedule as I was seeing in the video tutorial. I was selecting backup server instead of backup. So my question is, what's the difference? We have a server and 3 Mac terminals that have remote desktop profiles saved on the server under a partition called "user." If I'm understanding correctly, can I just create a backup script (instead of backup server) that backs up all server partitions, including the partition that the profiles are stored, or do I need to do a backup server script?

[rhwalker]

Backup Server continually polls for clients to appear and then backs them up. Mostly useful for notebooks that are transient. Backup runs the backup script at the appointed time, looks to see if clients are available at that time, and backs them up. Mostly useful for backing up servers and network-attached desktop computers.

 

See page 25 and Chapter 5 of the Retrospect 6.x Users Guide for a discussion.

 

Russ