External USB Hard Disk Rotation

[Ikrananka]

Hi,

 

I am trying out Retrospect Professional 6.5. My backup media will be two external removable USB hard disks and I have a peer-to-peer network of two workstations. I have successfully set up Retrospect on one of the PCs and installed the client on the other. I have successfully managed to manually start an immediate backup of both PC’s to one of my external hard drives. However, despite reading the manual, knowledge base and forums I have not managed to find out how to set up my backup routine and media rotation the way that I want.

 

Only one of the external USB drives will be connected to the PC at any one time. I want to be able to backup both PC’s to one of the external hard drives (Backup Set A?) one week, and then the next week backup to the second external hard drive (Backup Set B???). I then want to rotate each week between Drive A and Drive B. I do not want to schedule the backups, I would rather have them pre-defined and just kick them off when it’s convenient for me to do so. I also want to use encryption and software compressions for the backups. Can anyone advise the best way of setting this backup routine up.

 

I also have a few other questions relating to the above:

 

1. Do I need two backup sets (as I will be rotating two different backups), or only one backup set (as the drive letter is the same in both cases)?

2. Do I need to create two different Disaster Recovery CDs, one for each backup drive?

3. I tried using Easy Script, however the Backup Sets that it created did not have encryption and the option to set encryption was not displayed. I deleted the backup sets and recreated them manually adding encryption – I then added the backup sets back to the Easy Script script – will this work?

 

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Andrew

[natew]

Hi

 

You have this right for the most part:

 

You need two backup sets, one for each drive.

 

A Disaster recovery CD is only going to work on the machine that has Retrospect installed. You will have to do a standard recovery for the client machines.

 

Easy script is a wizard that sets up a script for you. Once the script is created you can do whatever you like to it - including add and delete backup sets or schedules. It sounds like you have a good handle on how all of this is supposed to work. You might want to skip easy script altogether and set up a script on your own.

 

Thanks

Nate