Full AND Incremental

[msurtees]

Hello.

 

We're currently using Arcserve which is, hands down, the most atrocious piece of software I've ever used in my life. I could write a book on why...but:

 

I've installed the Demo of Retrospect and love it...but...I do have a situation and would love to know if Retrospect can accomodate.

 

We have three servers. One of them runs accounting software that has to have a FULL backup every day. The other two servers can be incremental.

 

We have an HP DLT AutoLoader with six slots.

 

Is it possible to do a full backup each day of the accounting computer to slot 1 and do incrementals of the other servers to slots 2 through 6?

 

If not, does anyone have a similar situation and could share some ideas?

 

Thanks! If I can get this to work, we're buying it!

 

Michael

[lohman]

I'm in a similar situation and here's what I'm working on. I want to preface this reply with the fact that I haven't yet made this work, but I am making progress with it.

 

Hopefully Amy or someone else at Dantz can confirm my findings so far.

 

When you run backup, the way it knows what tapes in the autochanger to use is based on the name of the tape, not the actual slot. If you "validate" a tape, you'll receive a popup stating "The automated backup will check for a tape with X name". So it would make sense that if you erase a tape and give it the exact name that the valid dialogue mentions, that it would then search for it. To test this, I have formatted a tape in slot 6 and then attempted to run an interactive backup. Retrospect successfully scanned tapes 1-5, and then figured out that it should use tape 6. Retrospect doesn't seem to be "slot aware" at all; only tape names, since it has to scan every single tape to find the one it's looking for. It doesn't use my barcode reader either (which would speed up the scan significantly...Dantz)

 

So my theory is this:

Create a backup set for the single nightly full backup server

Create a seperate backup set for the incrementals

Create backup scripts for each of the sets

Validate the scripts and take note of the backup set name. So far it's been a number 1, followed by the set name in my setup.

Format the tapes that you want to use with the correct backup set names.

 

So far this seems to be working interactively with a single tape. I have not yet successfully told Dantz to use additional tapes for the set however. I erase the tapes and just incremented the tape number for the additional tapes that I wanted to be included in the "set". So my changer device list appears like this:

 

1-BackupSetA

2-BackupSetA

1-BackupSetB

1-BackupSetC

2-BackupSetC

3-BackupSetC

Untitled (My Overflow Spare)

 

So far I've been able to tell it to backup to a specific set, and it goes and finds tape 1 in that set regardless of what slot the tape is in. The problem I'm running into is that it won't move to the second tape. Once the 1-BackupSetA tape filles up, it pops up a prompt asking me for the next tape (instead of just finding it automatically). Here's the BIG problem: It won't let me choose a tape that is in the changer; it will only let me pick a tape that's actually in the drive; and as far as I can tell there is NO way to instruct Dantz to move the tape from the changer into the drive with erasing or scanning it. (I can't find a "load into drive" command)

 

So in theory (in my head) it should work and it almost does by finding the first tape, but it's getting stuck when I have to add more tapes into the set.

 

But if you just need to use a single tape for the full and incremental, then setup two backup sets (one that just has the full in it, the other has all of the incrementals). Validate the scripts and then erase your tapes so that they have the name that the script will be looking for. It seems to do ok with a single tape.