emaple Posted July 21, 2003 Report Share Posted July 21, 2003 I'm setting up a new Retrospect backup system using Retrospect 5.0 on an Xserve running Mac OS X. I have a mirrored pair of 180GB disks to which I plan to run my backups. I've setup two regular backup scripts to run on alternate weeks backing up to alternate backup sets on my mirrored disk. This way I always have a backup set from the previous week. Philosophy is that I'm not backing up servers with Retrospect and that almost all restore requests need the most recent backup. Ignoring any discussion about the correctness of this approach, I'd like to implement a similar strategy for backing up laptops using the backup server capability. However, it doesn't seem to have the ability to backup to alternating backup sets, at least not automagically. Does anyone have any suggestions for a reliable backup strategy that'll allow me to send backup server backups to alternating backup sets, either the same sets used by the regular scripts or sets dedicated to the backup server scripts? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadowspawn Posted July 22, 2003 Report Share Posted July 22, 2003 I assume from your description that you reset one of the backup sets each week? You could achieve the redundancy by backing up the laptops to both backup sets? (This does not leave one of the sets idle though, so is not an ideal solution. It is not as awful as it might sound from the time point of view, the incremental to the "idle" backup set will be small.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emaple Posted July 23, 2003 Author Report Share Posted July 23, 2003 Thanks for the reply. Yes, I will be recycling and reusing the older of the two backup sets each Friday. I had thought of specifying both backup sets in my backup server script, but wanted to avoid using more disk space unnecessarily by having duplicated backups. From what you said would that not happen? Another possible approach I thought of is to create two backup server scripts that are identical except for the backup set each uses, then set the Skip Scheduled Execution feature to hold one for a week while the other executes. With execution only allowed Mon-Fri it means that I have to remember to change the Skip To date each Friday, and I have to make sure that the current backup server script and regular backup script are backing up to the same backup set. A little combersome, but perhaps not any worse than remembering to change tapes once a week if I was backing up to tape. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadowspawn Posted July 24, 2003 Report Share Posted July 24, 2003 Quote: I had thought of specifying both backup sets in my backup server script, but wanted to avoid using more disk space unnecessarily by having duplicated backups. From what you said would that not happen? I'm suggesting that although it is duplicated, it may not waste much space. The initial backup is "large". Once that is done you effectively always have two of those, one in the idle backup set, one in the live backup set. The incremental backup is "small". You always have that in the live backup set anyway. The wasted space is that you could also put that in the idle backup set. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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