Replacing drive breaks Dupe-Avoidance

[MrPete]

The "Don't Add Duplicates To Backup Set" feature works as advertised to minimize backup sizes across our network... except under one major circumstance.

 

Every time we copy or move files between drive partitions, all the files are backed up the next time:

• Replicate a dying drive onto a new one
• Split a partition into two

 

In addition, as another user noted, replicating a drive is enough to break all existing scripts, even though the partition name has been retained. The old "E Drive" is grayed out and a new "E Drive" shows up everywhere.

 

I see this across the board.

 

It indicates two things to me:

1) Retrospect probably uses the partition serial number to distinguish copies of the same partition.

2) Retrospect does NOT treat files on the "old" and "new" partition as the "same" file.

 

This is a problem in more than one way, particularly in the dying-drive-replication scenario:

a) The backed up file structures under the previous drive are no longer considered part of the same incremental backup set. Thus, one must look at two (or more) separate backup sequences to discover backups of a specific file.

There's a terrible waste of backup space. Each time a laptop drive dies (or a user splits or combines partitions), BOOM, there goes a few hundred GB of backup space.

 

This is not at all how the feature is described to work!

 

Questions:

 

1) Even if the files are on different computers, isn't only one copy supposed to be stored? Same file name, dates, contents, etc etc.

 

2) Doesn't it make sense in the replaced-drive scenario, where the system actually KNOWS the old partition is gone and the new one has the same name etc, to simply allow the new one to take over without requiring all scripts to be updated?

 

These seem like defects to me. Or am I missing something?