Retrospect allows multiple drives to be backed up to and restored from a single "media set" without requiring partitioning, and allows periodic rotation of "media sets" by allowing different schedules for the same backup script to specify different "media sets".Īh, you may say, but someone has to take the time to physically move the rotated-out "media set" offsite and move the rotated-in "media set" onsite. Who might that "anyone else" be? Basically anyone who is responsible for backing up multiple drives-which don't all have to be on the same LAN (there are Retrospect users doing backups across multiple time zones)-onto physical media (disk or tape) and wants tight centralized control. I'll spell out in another post the problems I ran into, for the benefit of anyone else who may want to follow in my footsteps. I've generally been quite happy with it, and got it all working satisfactorily within a month. Those requirements led me last July to install the $119 "Desktop" version of Retrospect 12 (updated in September to Retrospect 12.5). Given that-per item (3) above-I am stuck with a physical-backup-drive offsite solution, and that the offsite drive needs to be rotated weekly, changing scripts weekly to refer to partitions on the rotated-in backup drive-or wiping out sparse bundles-would be messy and error-prone. (4) SuperDuper requires a separate backup-drive partition for each drive to be backed up, and all variants of over-the-LAN Time Machine (including Airport Extreme) at least setup a separate sparse bundle for each drive to be backed up. The corresponding slow download speed would also make recovery of even 30GB drive contents take at least 1.5 days-which is no faster than I could retrieve a physical drive stored offsite. However cloud backup is impractical for my installation, because of the slow upload speed of the only available and reliable internet connection method. (3) Per item (2) above, I also need to have reasonably-up-to-date backups stored offsite. This rules out backup drive(s) directly attached to the computers where the 4 drives are installed. That is because of a very real danger of flooding from an apartment two floors above mine. (2) The backups must be to a device that is in a room that happens to be separated by 15-20 feet-but 40 cable-length feet-from the one where all of my 4 drives now/soon requiring daily backup are located. If I add to that the drive on my Retrospect "backup server", that makes 6 drives total. (1) I have 5 drives that must be backed up one daily, three more currently weekly but soon to be daily, and one more weekly. If they don't apply to you, kindly skip the rest of this thread : Let me start out by briefly recapping my home installation's special requirements, which are no longer up for discussion. Therefore I would like to gently re-propose the alternative I implemented more than 6 months ago, which is Retrospect 12 running "pull-to-server" backups of multiple drives over a LAN. Starting with this post in the Airport Extreme thread, I detect a certain Ach disenchantment with offsite backup via a cloud service such as Crashplan or Backblaze-as well as with the current state of the Airport Extreme itself. Retrospect 13, released 1 March 2016, also does cloud backup-described starting with this post. Retrospect 12 only did non-cloud backup, as described starting with this OP.
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