Multiple Tape Drives

[MrDesert]

Hello,

 

 

I am running Retrospect 5 on a MacOSX machine and I have two tapedrives. A DDS4 DAT drive and an AIT drive. I am attempting to back one part of my machine onto the AIT drive and one part on the DAT. I have set up my seperate backup jobs, and seperate backup sets, but I can't see a way to specify the backup device for each job. Is this even possible? Can I at least specify which device is backed up to first? I really want to minimize the amout of times during the week I have to swap tapes....

 

Thanks!!

 

-MrDesert

 

[denniskane]

There is no way to differentiate between tape drives except to make sure that the scripts run at separate times and that either one drive is turned off or that it has no media available to it. Can't do it in software, at least not Retro. Sorry.

[shadowspawn]

As long as the tapes in the tape drives are already part of a backup set, there is no confusion and no need to restrict Retrospect to a particular device. A simple way to add a tape to a set is to perform a small backup. (Just naming the tape does not make it part of the backup set.)

 

e.g. To get started, do a small backup to set A in one drive, do a small backup to set B in the other drive. Now with tapes 1-A and 1-B in the drives, automated backups just work the way you expect.

 

When one of the backup sets fills up a tape, if you are present you can insert a tape in the appropriate drive. Otherwise, just do another small manual backup and insert the new tape when prompted by Retrospect. Again, when the unattended operation runs subsequently there is no problem because the tapes available are for specific backup sets.