My last post showed how to do grooming in Retrospect 8. There were a ton of questions about what exactly grooming is. Think about it this way, Retrospect backup scripts use snapshots. If you do a backup without a recycle 20 times, then you have 20 snapshots. If you changed a 1 gig file every day then you’ll have 20 gigs taken up by that one file. Now let’s say that you groom away 10 of those backups by setting a grooming policy of 10. Now you have only 10 gigs taken up by that file. So any file not required for the 10 last backups will be removed from the disk based backup set when the next grooming script runs. When would you use grooming? Any time you have sets that grow and you don’t want to recycle them. Why wouldn’t you want to recycle them? Because right after the recycle event you’ll have a potential point of failure where you don’t have a copy of your data, which you currently mitigate by having multiple sets with the same data… Very inefficient compared to grooming…
Another great utility script in Retrospect 8 for Mac is the ability to copy a media set or copy another backup. This allows you to skip a step in a number of offsite rotation scripts or disk2disk2tape setups. One immediate use might be to duplicate a recently groomed set of disk based backups to tape in order to send them off to Iron Mountain or some other offsite storage. I’m currently testing using this with Amazon S3 for offsite, but cannot say that my tests are going very well…
Side Note: Speaking of Amazon I got my bill for last month from them for my S3 account. A whopping 12 cents. I wonder if it costs more to swipe my Amex?
