Carillon Posted February 25, 2010 Report Share Posted February 25, 2010 Is it okay to locate the catalog files on an external HD instead of the internal HD of the OS drive where the engine and console are installed? I have two external HDs one will be used for backups and the other I'd like to use for catalog files. Thoughts? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted February 25, 2010 Report Share Posted February 25, 2010 I have two external HDs one will be used for backups and the other I'd like to use for catalog files Sounds perfect; makes sense not to store the Catalog file on the same physical device you're asking Retrospect to protect. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carillon Posted February 25, 2010 Author Report Share Posted February 25, 2010 Sounds good... My main backup is right at 3.6TB and the catalog file is 77GB! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted February 25, 2010 Report Share Posted February 25, 2010 Actually, to me, the best practice is to keep a copy of the catalog on a different physical device. Keeping the catalog itself on a different physical device only affects performance (improves performance because of overlapped seeks/reads/writes with the media set) and gives greater flexibility (because the media set can be taken offsite but the catalog can still be available for searching / browsing). Nether helps nor hurts reliability. If the physical drive on which you have your media set goes bad, it really doesn't matter whether you have the catalog or not. Having a copy of the catalog can help if the original becomes damaged - it saves the hours of reconstructing the catalog from the media set. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carillon Posted February 25, 2010 Author Report Share Posted February 25, 2010 Thanks Russ... I think I've settled on a configuration that includes the internal HD of my Intel Mac running the engine and console, an external HD where I store the backups and finally a third HD where I store the catalog files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maser Posted February 25, 2010 Report Share Posted February 25, 2010 That's probably a wise idea. I've rebuilt catalogs recently on *very large* media sets -- and it needed about 80G of space for which to rebuild the catalog file. Smaller media sets it's not so much of an issue. That's one of my feature requests -- when you rebuild a catalog file -- even if the catalog file is set to be *compressed* -- the rebuild will be *uncompressed* until the rebuild is done -- at which point it then compresses the catalog file -- and it needs even *more* space for which to do this... As an example, just last night I rebuilt a catalog for one of my 860G media sets (over 4.5 million files) When the rebuild was done, the catalog file took about 65G -- but then to get the *compressed* catalog, it expanded to the size of what would be the final "compressed" size -- an additional 14G. Before settling on the final compressed 14G version. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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