Not a bug (maybe), but a grooming "status" question

[Maser]

So, I was testing what would happen with a disk media set set for "groom 10" would do when a hard disk filled up that was trying to back up to that media set.

 

The Activity for the backup that is be running only says how many files are remaining to be backed up when this happens.

 

There's no indication that it's *not* a crash (besides the activity icon spinning.) Fans are blaring on my MacBook.

 

I had to click "log" (and refresh) to see that my media set is actually being groomed at this point in time.

 

There should be some visual indication that an automatic groom is running in the summary listing.

 

Take that back...

 

Every so often the summary status changes to "Matching Final" and somethimg is showing in "Completed" with a large number of files and a number of GB -- but then it goes away.

 

So I have no real idea of the "status" of this activity at any point. Doing a "Refresh" from the menu doesn't update anything.

 

What *should* happen is that a new activity (maybe) that indicates an automatic groom is running should show in the activities list.

 

I'll leave this running to see what happens, but I guess I won't really know if it worked until I see if/when the backup activity finishes.

[Mayoff]

Even on Windows it is hard to tell what grooming is doing. Large sets (3 TB) could take as much as 24 hours or more to groom. A small set could take from 60 minutes to 6 hours. It may be hard to tell what Retrospect is doing, but you need to see if it finishes on it's own

[Maser]

Waiting for a groom to finish isn't a problem.

 

The problem is there's no GUI indication of what's going on. It would not be a large leap for a user to thing the engine has "locked up" because there's nothing telling them on-screen what is going on.

 

Maybe this should be a "Feature request".

[Mayoff]

I have noted it before. We know the UI does not provide enough feedback for many different operations and gets into a beach ball pointer when it should not. These are all tweaks we will be fixing in the short term.

[mauricev]

Large sets (3 TB)

 

3 TB is large? Make that 30 TB :speechless:

[Maser]

I'd love to see somebody try to groom 30 TB and report how long it takes.

 

I think 3TB is the largest "affordable" consumer-level RAID 5 enclosure isn't it? Something like the LaCie "Biggest Quadra" or something?

 

(I know these will continue to get bigger all the time, but...)

 

 

 

[Mayoff]

If you have 30 TB of data, I would probably not use grooming. it has never been tested or Mac or Windows with anything that big. What slows down grooming is the total number of snapshots/sessions/files more then the total size.

 

One more thing is fragmentation. Grooming will cause heavy disk fragmentation and users should defrag when needed.

[mauricev]

I think 3TB is the largest "affordable" consumer-level RAID 5 enclosure isn't it? Something like the LaCie "Biggest Quadra" or something?

 

15/16 drive arrays have been common for about a decade or so and they're not terribly expensive. See http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816102113 for example. Seagate just announced 2 TB drives.

 

If you have 30 TB of data, I would probably not use grooming.

 

You may have a point. Our users keep adding to our server and don't delete much. Our other backup sets don't get anywhere near this large because there isn't enough time in the backup window to include more than 20 or so desktops.