How to do incremental backups on Retrospect 8

[ranj]

Hi

 

At our school I am currently following the 5 day script as shown like the training videos on the EMC website.

 

The backups are sent nightly to a NAS Box. At the moment it is working fine, it backups fine but to backup about 700gb of data can take approx 12 hours. Within this there are 5 media sets (one for each day) on a weekend I have another 4 media sets and this data is held on a different NAS box, the weekend backups are so far working fine.

 

I want to change the backup strategy so mon-thu it does an incremental backup and Friday it does a full backup and then it repeats this every week deleting the previous weeks data.

 

Can anyone guide me how I could do this if they have done this successfully with version 8 on a MAC client?

 

I have tried all sorts of combinations and I just cant get it to do incremental, it just does a full backup.

 

Thanks

[AntonioRocco]

Hi Ranj

 

AFAIK defining a script as Full Backup means it will be Incremental. This is how it used to be in previous versions of Retrospect and from what I've seen so far it does not seem to have changed that much.

 

For what you want to do and to keep it simple you could do it with two scripts? One for Monday to Thursday and one for Friday. Monday's tape will be the Full Backup and Tuesday through till Thursday will store the Incremental changes based on Monday's catalog. The first time Friday is run will be the full backup and the following Friday will just be the Incremental changes based on the previous Friday's Catalog. Over time incremental backups will invariably span multiple tapes unless you plan to rotate the tapes on a monthly or quarterly cycle (for example) before they start requiring a second tape.

 

Does this help?

 

Antonio Rocco (ACSA)