bpieber Posted November 6, 2009 Report Share Posted November 6, 2009 I have some questions regarding Retrospect's transfer function: 1. Is there a verification step after a transfer? The User Guide does not say anything about this. If not, how can I be sure that every file was transferred without error? 2. According to the User Guide the "Copy Snapshots" option transfers a backup set's current snapshots to the destination catalog. Are only the snapshots currently listed in the catalog copied or also those on the backup media? In other words if I could retrieve older snapshots in backup sets snapshot tab, will I be able to retrieve those in the new backup set? 3. I don't understand the sentence "Snapshots are not copied to the destination backup set's media." in the Backup Set Transfer Options section of the User Guide. 4. I am not sure if I grasp the consequences of the "Merge sessions" option. Does it mean that if session 1 contained a version 1 of file 1 and session 2 contained version 2 of file 1 only one version of file 1 would end up in the target backup set? If yes, which one? If no, what would be a use case I could not do with the target backup set if I checked "Merge sessions"? 5. What happens if one of my 79 DVDs turns out to be unreadable during a transfer? What are my options to deal with this situation? Sorry for bothering you with so many questions. I did read the relevant sections of the User Guide several times and also all the posts I could find about the transfer function in this forum. Any answers are greatly appreciated. Cheers, Bernhard Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted November 6, 2009 Report Share Posted November 6, 2009 5. What happens if one of my 79 DVDs turns out to be unreadable during a transfer? What are my options to deal with this situation? You are given the option to mark that member as "missing", and Retrospect tries to do the best it can with what is left. Any files needed from that missing member, of course, will not be transferred and won't be in the new backup set. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
twickland Posted November 6, 2009 Report Share Posted November 6, 2009 1. Is there a verification step after a transfer? No, there is no comparison step after the transfer. Although the process should be pretty safe, I guess this really means we're trusting to luck. 2. According to the User Guide the "Copy Snapshots" option transfers a backup set's current snapshots to the destination catalog. Are only the snapshots currently listed in the catalog copied or also those on the backup media? In other words if I could retrieve older snapshots in backup sets snapshot tab, will I be able to retrieve those in the new backup set? Only the catalog snapshots are copied. If you wanted older snapshots, you would first need to retrieve them from the backup media before performing the transfer. 3. I don't understand the sentence "Snapshots are not copied to the destination backup set's media." in the Backup Set Transfer Options section of the User Guide. It means that only the snapshots already in the source backup set's catalog are copied to the destination backup set's catalog. Older snapshots on the source backup set's media will be lost. 4. I am not sure if I grasp the consequences of the "Merge sessions" option. Does it mean that if session 1 contained a version 1 of file 1 and session 2 contained version 2 of file 1 only one version of file 1 would end up in the target backup set? A backup "session" is the backup of a single source volume (or subvolume) at a particular time. If you go to Reports> Contents, you will see a listing of all the backup sessions for your backup set. "Merge sessions" means that the record of all those separate sessions would be lost. I think that could affect your ability to search for files by source volume; while I'm not absolutely sure about that, I personally wouldn't want to risk it. I would only use this option if I had only a single source volume. There should be no effect on the files actually being transferred There is an option for transferring only the most recent version of each file. This may be more in line with what you'd like to do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bpieber Posted November 7, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 7, 2009 Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, Russ! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bpieber Posted November 7, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 7, 2009 Thanks for your detailed answers! As for the consequences of "Merge sessions": I have only one volume in the backup set I need to transfer - it is a jobs archive. However, I have not selected the "Merge sessions" option since that seemed safer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bpieber Posted November 7, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 7, 2009 Just for the records, I did a simple test of a transfer with the option "Merge sessions" checked. The resulting merged session in the target backup set can indeed hold multiple versions of the same file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted November 7, 2009 Report Share Posted November 7, 2009 If you stand back and look at the forest rather than the trees, Retrospect only makes sense if you view it as a database manipulator (the backup set is a database). All of the operations that Retrospect performs on the backup set are operations on a database. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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