vmgcinematic Posted April 15, 2009 Report Share Posted April 15, 2009 Hi guys, I'm in an environment where we have 5 external hard drives that move from machine to machine in the course of normal use. I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for how to handle the backups. One obvious way is to have a central docking station where the drives are left over night, and all scheduled backups happen from that machine. This is less than ideal because of the hassle of physically moving the drives (crawling under desks to unplug power bricks, etc). What would be great is if Retrospect could back up the drives no matter where they are. I realize it's quite difficult to 'find' a drive on a network, so it's probably not possible to have Retrospect have a script that just looks for the drive, finds it, and backs it up. But what if there are only 3 computers that the drives are hooked up to. I could have 15 scripts, one for each drive-computer pair. In a given backup cycle, 10 of the scripts would fail (intentional) and the other 5 would catch the drives and back them up. But will this end up tripling my media set storage requirements? If a drive is hooked to Computer A, is there any way for Retrospect to know it's the same drive that was hooked up to Computer B last night, and is only a couple Gb different than that backup? Appreciate any insight. Nick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted April 16, 2009 Report Share Posted April 16, 2009 I'm not in a position to read carefully what you're looking to do (for example, if the drives move from machine to machine in normal use, why is it less then ideal to move the drives?), but it sounds as if you're just trying too hard. If a drive is hooked to Computer A, is there any way for Retrospect to know it's the same drive that was hooked up to Computer B last night, and is only a couple Gb different than that backup? Yes. That's exactly how the program works; it only backups up changed files, no matter what drive they're on, no matter what machine that drive is connected to. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vmgcinematic Posted April 16, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 16, 2009 Thanks Dave. The drives move around from time to time, staying with a given machine for 3 days sometimes, 3 weeks other times (not permanent enough to install into machines, but not exactly a thumb drive). I just know carrying them all across the room every night to be backed up will tempt the gods of statistics and eventually one will hit the floor and blow a day's work. But the way you're saying Retrospect works - being able to recognize file matches across source media - makes it a great solution to my problem. Does this also mean, for example, that Retrospect is smart enough to only store one copy of my common OS files that are identical on all my machines? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted April 16, 2009 Report Share Posted April 16, 2009 Does this also mean, for example, that Retrospect is smart enough to only store one copy of my common OS files that are identical on all my machines? Yes, through the magic of Snapshots. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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