Confused--best way to do this?

[bioheath]

Hello. I have managed to confuse myself and would like some best practices advice.

 

I have 16 groups that I would like to back up. Each group has from 1 to 5 computers in it.

 

I would like to limit the total space allocated to each group to XXX GB (it varies from 500 to 1000 GB per group now but will grow more later.) I only need the last 10 backups for any given machine and want to groom out all backups over the most recent 10.

 

***Here is what I have done in an attempt to do this.

 

Created 16 Disk media sets on an attached RAID limited to 500GB each. Created 25 or so scripts, one computer per script, and pointed each script to the appropriate group's media set. Some media sets have one script pointed at them, some have 2 or more. I set each media set to groom to 10 backups.

 

This seemed to be working fine until one of my media sets filled up and started asking for new media. Apparently the 500GB I had originally given to it is insufficient to keep 10 backups of all of the computers pointed to it. I need to expand it to 1000 GB for now.

 

There is not enough free space on the RAID to allocate additional space to the existing media set, so I added another larger RAID. Now I need to make additional space (from the new RAID) available to the scripts pointing to the media set that is out of space.

 

How should I do this? Do I create an additional 500GB disk media set on the new RAID and pair it *in the scripts* to the original media set that has run out of space? Will this confuse Retrospect when it grooms? Logically it would make more sense to have one media set that the scripts in a group point to (a kind of front-end for the media set) and have multiple Disk media sets comprise the total storage in the media set. I don't know how to do this if it is possible.

 

I am sure that at some point in the future the amount of storage space available to each group of computers will need to expand (to 1000GB, then 2000 GB) and will need to span multiple disks. I am trying to do it right from the go instead of having to lose the backup data and create media sets differently at some point down the road.

 

Thanks for any insight. I am open to suggestions for a good long-term plan.

 

[Mayoff]

You could add a 2nd member to the existing media sets so that the backup will span from the old RAID to the new RAID.

[bioheath]

That is a very good suggestion. I tried it this morning and all seems well. For some reason I was thinking that Disk media sets couldn't have multiple members, only tape sets or something like that. I am not sure where that idea came from, but this is a good solution. Thanks!