Sanity check on snapshots & disk set's

[Delboy]

Having been forced to rebuild two of my systems I decided to alter the way I use Retrospect to save storage capacity. Now I am not certain my solution is going to work as i expect:-

 

With 3 PC's on my home LAN i have one with Retrospect 6.5 backing upto a disk set on a Maxtor USb drive. The other two I use the backup client but now store the contents of tehse two PC's into the same disk set, the idea being that as all run XP, most have the same software i can save storage space. Each device has its own catalog file.

 

Assuming a given file exists on all three devices, if one file is modified and backed up to the common store I am assuming that any restores performed on the other two PC's will restore the appropriatte (un-modified) version of the file, not the latest version backed up from the 3rd PC?

 

I know this maybe a fundamental question but having encountered a few problems I do not wish to introduce a new one by relying on a single disk set (actually tehre are two copies of the disk set, yes I back the main disk set up to another drive for safety :-))

[natew]

Hi

 

Your assumption is correct. Retrospect tracks file versions on a per volume basis. In the event of a restore Retrospect will restore the file versions that are noted in the snapshot you choose to restore.

 

A side note - Retrospect does not do any multi volume matching in the Windows directory. In other words, the Windows directory is backed up from each machine seperately.

 

Thanks

Nate

[Delboy]

Nate,

 

 

 

Thanks for the confirmation, interested in your side note about the Windows directory. I read it to mean that the \Windows directory has all files backed up for each volume regardless of whether they are already in the backup set with the same file attributes? If this is the case then idea why Retrospect treats this particular directory differently to the others?

[natew]

Hi

 

I think we are saying the same thing. With file based backup there is a remote possiblity that files may be identical in size but the contents may actually be slightly different. For instance if you open an ini file and change the string "sys" to "sis" the file size will not change. Normally the create date or modify date would show that the file has changed. We just don't want to take chances on the OS folder.

 

To eliminate the possibility of missing important system files this way, Retrospect backs up the windows folder from each machine seperately.

 

BTW this is very unlikely to happen with other files so Retrospect is allowed to match them out.

 

Nate