Grooming frees little space

[dnpeters]

I'm using 7.6.123 and make daily backups of my XP laptop and Vista desktop. It took almost 6 months to fill my 500 gig external drive, which is used only for Retrospect. I groomed both backup sets to the last 10 backups, but was surprised to discover that this freed up less than 100 gig on the drive. I then recycled both backup sets and ran new backups of each, which freed up more than 400 gig. I'd prefer to groom instead of recycle, but this doesn't seem to free up as much space as I think it should. Is there a reason for this? Thanks. - Dave

[MRIS]

grooming to "10" backups (or more) activates a special feature in retrospect where it doesn't actually groom to that number, instead it "keeps as many as will fit" or something like that.

 

the advice is to use another number, such as 9.

 

my advice is to use the "retrospect defined policy" which works well for all cases.

[dnpeters]

Thanks MRIS, I'll try using the "retrospect defined policy" the next time I have to groom. If this is a known bug in Retrospect, hopefully it'll be corrected in the next update. Again, thanks. - Dave

[MRIS]

Again this is not a bug. I think the actual words are: "Will try to keep 'at least' 10 snapshots active".

 

So this number isn't a maximum, it's a minimum.

 

refer page 94 in the PDF manual.

 

If you want your disk based backup set to consume less total space, change the size of the member of the disk based backup set. Other than that, it's perfectly healthy for a disk based backup set to hover at "near full" status indefinitely. 400GB of a 500GB member size (eg on a 750GB disk) is fine. My tip is to make the member size approx 90% of the actual disk size if that disk is dedicated to this purpose. Do NOT make the member size equal to or greater than the actual disk size.

Edited May 18, 2009 by Guest
grammer