cmykdesign Posted September 28, 2009 Report Share Posted September 28, 2009 Please forgive what might be a little bit of a basic question. I'm afraid I'm a graphic designer and my talents lie somewhere outside of server backup procedures! What I'd really like would be for somebody to confirm that my approach is in any way sensible before I instigate something that will come back to bite us! We have a large volume of files on our xserve which, although we may need to refer to them from time to time, we won't actually be editing. Previously we had set up our daily backup scripts initially to duplicate all files but then, after the first run, we amended them to only copy files changed in the last week. This leaves us with five backup drives each with an entire backup snapshot for the last working week which would make restoring a snap. However, this also leaves us with a lot of redundant, duplicated data on each of the five backup drives which are rapidly filling up. What I plan to do now, is to follow a similar plan however, amended to the following steps: 1: Monthly backup of all existing files to "Snapshot" dataset 2: Setup backup scripts Mon, Tue, Wed etc duplicating only files amended in the last 7 days The idea being that, should the worst happen, we would restore the contents of the Snapshot set and then restore the contents of the last daily set, overwriting where necessary (ie where old files have been amended). We're using OSX Retrospect 6.1.230 Many thanks for reading Matt 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted September 28, 2009 Report Share Posted September 28, 2009 Matt, It's unclear from your post whether you are doing "duplicates" or instead whether you are doing "backups". They aren't the same. See: What is the difference between "Backup" and "Duplicate"? Also, because your question relates to Retrospect 6 for Macintosh, you might have better luck with a response if you posted in the Retrospect 6 for Macintosh forum (yes, the names are confusing, and the Retrospect 6 for Macintosh forum is slightly mis-named): Retrospect 6 for Macintosh forum If, in fact, you are doing "backups", then restoring the most recent snapshot does everything at once. It takes a bit to understand the Retrospect paradigm, which is different from that of other backup programs. Essentially, under the hood, even though an initial "full" backup is done followed by daily "incremental" backups, Retrospect presents a paradigm of "snapshots", whereby it knows where each of the files present on each day's backup session is located within the backup set, even though it only backs up the changed files. You restore from a "snapshot", which is a list of files (and metadata) at the time the backup session was done, even if a complete ("Full") backup was not made during that session. Hope this helps, Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cmykdesign Posted September 29, 2009 Author Report Share Posted September 29, 2009 Thanks for the reply Rus - and you're right, I'm doing backups. I shall repost in the Mac forums Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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