agorman_co Posted November 7, 2002 Report Share Posted November 7, 2002 I am new as a retrospect administrator. I bought retrospect pro 6.0 mainly because of its claims to eliminate/reduce redundant data in the backups. I have three machines in my home network, a file/backup server and two clients. I was surprised to see that files that were backed up from the file server were subsequently backed up from the clients to which they were copied, even though there were no changes to the files (i.e., they were just copied from the server to a client). I thought that the same file would not be backed up more than once to the same backup set. Why would the copy get backed up if the original was already backed up? What constitutes a redundant file? Is there a way to configure how redundant files are identified? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted November 7, 2002 Report Share Posted November 7, 2002 Matching is the scheme for comparing file attributes to determine whether files are identical, which then allows intelligent copying to avoid redundancy. Also see incremental backup. Retrospect uses several matching criteria to find new or changed files. If one of the criteria has been changed, Retrospect will back up the file again. On Windows, Retrospect looks at creation date and time, modified date and time, size and name. If match only in same location option is set, Retrospect matches on the path, volume name and drive letter also. By default, the archive attribute is not used as a matching criteria in Windows, allowing for true and reliable backups to multiple backup sets. You can look at Reports > Contents to view new and changed files backed up in a given session in your backup set. Find a file that should be identical on both computers and get Properties on the file. Then look at a session for the other computer, find the same file and get Properties. You can compare the information provided to see what was different between the two files, indicating why the file was backed up from both computers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agorman_co Posted November 7, 2002 Author Report Share Posted November 7, 2002 Your info was very helpful. I see that copying a file in Win XP causes the creation date of the new file to be set to the current time/date, while the modification date is unchanged. So, it apprears that it is not matching because of different creation dates. Seems like a large problem that many people should be having. Is anyone aware of a work around? It doesn't seem like custom selectors can be set up to do this. Any advice? Andy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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