Confused about Media Sets & Members

[kevinpoole]

I'm doing D2D backups over the network to 15 separate eSATA hard drives, all of which are empty and mounted on my desktop. I created three separate backup scripts to run on three different media sets, comprised of 5 member disks each. I assumed that if I added the five disks as members to each media set in advance of running the scripts, the backups would automatically use an empty member as they got filled up.

 

The first time I ran a backup in this manner, I got the "new member needed" message after the first disk was filled. OK... so I tried to manually select the next member. No go -- it said it was already in use as a member. Um, yeah. With no other obvious option, I ended up stopping the backup.

 

Before I ran the same script again, I first deleted all the unused members from the media sets in Retrospect, and deleted the Retrospect folders from the disks themselves. Then, when I started the script again, I was able to successfully choose a new member disk to add to the media set.

 

My initial backups are going to span across several disks, and I can't be manually intervening every time a new member is needed.

 

Am I missing something, or is there really no way to have Retrospect automatically jump to a previously-established media set member disk?

 

 

[kevinpoole]

Looks like it worked this time around -- my current backup automatically jumped to the next media set member without any problem. Phew! I think the problem before was that I'd canceled the backup when it reached about 99% of the first hard drive's capacity and had slowed to a crawl. Restarting the backup at that point was messy.

 

I think the lesson here is: when backing up onto hard drives, make sure the max. capacity is set to less than 100%.