The Inner Workings of Retrospect Backup Set Rotations?

[cjporosk]

I'm still trying to figure out how to make the power of Retrospect 6.0 backup set rotations work for us - without going insane. Here is my question:

 

1. We do a tape backup each week night. On Monday we do a recycle backup which takes two tapes. On Tues through Friday we just need to do normal backups, each night to a separate tape (each day's backup tape is stored off-site). So we are using 6 tapes per week and one backup set. **How can we avoid having Retrospect prompt us for media while doing this rotation each week?? If not, what backup rotation should we be using to avoid media prompts? (remember, we just want to do a full backup once a week and normal backups to individual tapes the rest of the week)

 

Please don't tell me I have to manually erase all tapes in the backup set each week, to avoid prompts. Retrospect has to be smarter than that.

 

Thanks!

Chris

[AmyJ]

If your goal is to use a seperate tape each night, you must create a seperate backup set for each tape.

 

Retrospect is designed to write to tape until the member is full, before moving on to the next tape. If you are using one backup set for Tuesday through Friday, it won't be possible to put in a new tape each night unless:

 

a) The option is set to always skip to blank media

- and -

A blank tape is in the drive

 

This would require you to erase the tapes ahead of time - which takes away from the idea of having an invisible backup.

 

When customers want to switch tapes each day, we recommend using unique backup sets for each tape. However, your post indicated that your backup will not fit on one tape. You may want to consider using higher capacity tapes, or backing up less data (excluding things like cache files, recycle bin, etc.)

 

 

[cjporosk]

Thanks for the quick and thorough reply!

 

Unfortunately, that's what I thought the response would be. We been waiting for several versions now for Retrospect to include this simple function of overwriting the tape during a backup (or even to schedule a plain tape erasure). Very frustrating that our 'hands are tied' still even with version 6.0. The power is there, but it is throttled down significantly without such a feature. It could even be included in some obscure menu with a million warnings, but it amazes me that it still is nowhere to be found in such an otherwise powerful program. Please include in 6.5??? Pretty please with data on top?