a question & a suggestion

[urza311]

I've been using Retrospect for many years now... I really like it, but there are two things I'd like to see in the future (or maybe one of them now if I just haven't figured out how to do it...).

 

 

 

#1 -- My typical backup plan is a recycle backup on Tuesday nights and normal backups the rest of the week. Our office frequently sees a lot of weekend work, but not always, so if someone does work on the weekend, I want that work backed up in the evening as well. And, for a couple of reasons, I want my Macs to shut down after the nightly backup. Well, this presents a small problem -- if the backup runs Friday night and shuts the computer down, but nobody comes in to work that weekend, when they turn on the Mac on Monday morning, Retrospect realizes two backups should have run in the meantime and cues them up, even though no files have changed since the last backup. What I'd like to do is configure it so if the computer is off at the time a designated script is supposed to run, when it comes back on, it skips that backup and waits for the next one. I've looked around in the preferences and stuff and can't find anything that will allow me to do this. Is it possible to add an option like this in the future?

 

 

 

#2 -- I'd *love* to see a basic SMTP service added into Retrospect so we can avoid having to rely on third-party solutions and AppleScripts to send out backup reports. I've got computers in some places that have TCP setup but have no need of any email program (for instance, a file server). Plus on Macs where I'm using a real person's email program to send out backup reports, this clutters their sent mail folder with system-generated email they have to delete themselves. It's not a major disaster, but it'd really be helpful to build SMTP directly into Retrospect itself.

[IrenaS]

It sounds like a Backup Server script would suit your needs. It goes out on the network and looks for computers that are on the network, then backs them up according to how long it's been since they were backed up.

 

 

 

In your scenario, backup server will skip the clients that are turned off over the weekend. When everyone comes in on Monday, backup server will try to get to the computers that were not backed up over the weekend first.