Immediate backup causes normal backup to back up everything

[adamnyc]

We have five backup sets corresponding to five tapes (Monday - Friday). For each tape, we have a backup schedule that runs a recycle backup of complete data once every eight weeks followed by seven weeks of normal incremental backups.

 

This works fine except for when we run an immediate recycle backup to a separate backup tape (with a separate backup set name) which tape we take offsite monthly. After we run an immediate recycle backup to that tape, all the following scheduled "normal" backups to our Monday-Friday tapes back up *everything*, not just the new and changed data as they normally would. Because we do not have enough room on the tapes for two complete backups, when we arrive in the morning, we're prompted for a second tape. It's as if that immediate backup to a different backup set makes the other tapes unable to compare their data to their stored catalogs and they then forget that the tape already contains a recycle backup. The logs do in fact show that "normal" backups were run on the M-F tapes subsequent to the off-site tape immediate backup, but those normal backups backed up everything. What am I doing wrong?

[AmyJ]

Quote:

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The logs do in fact show that "normal" backups were run on the M-F tapes subsequent to the off-site tape immediate backup, but those normal backups backed up everything. What am I doing wrong?

 

 

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How are you determining that everything is getting backed up again? By the amount of files?

 

To see which files are backed up in a given session, go to Reports > Session Contents. Find the date of one of the full (but supposed to be incremental) backups to see what files were actually backed up. Find a file that absolutely should not have changed since the prior week and right-click to get Properties on the file. Minimize the properties (leave the window open).

 

Go to Restore > Find Files. Choose the above backup set for the source and anything for the destination. When you get to the Searching and Retrieving:Searching window, type in the name of the file that you got properties on. In the next window go to Files Chosen to see the list of files that match the name you typed in. Find the 'newest' match - and get properties on the file. Compare that screen to the Properties screen that was minimized in the above paragraph and look for differences - dates, time, etc. With time, even the seconds count.

 

Matching is the scheme for comparing file attributes to determine whether files are identical, which then allows intelligent copying to avoid redundancy.

 

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.