I have Retrospect 6.5 that came with my WD external hard drive. The documentation indicates that it will do a full backup the first time, then only incremental ones each night. however, mine seems to be trying for the complete deal each night and my ext. hd runs out of space.
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hey filip - thanks for writing!
it's hard for me to tell, but i think the full backup did run. i eded up with subfolders namded "Backup Set A" and now i'm up to "J" and they had a massive amount of odd looking files.
Version is OEM Express 6.5.342.
There is a wizard, but i find it limited in the information it provides about the source files and destination folders.
For Retrospect to be able to do an incremental backup, it needst to use the same backup set each time it runs. So if a new backup set is created each time it runs, this is the reason for the full backup.
The question is why it creates a new backup set? One reason I can think of is that it is configured to use different media each time (e.g. one for Monday, one for Tuesday, etc.).
I don't have a copy of Retrospect Express so I can't help you with precise steps in the GUI, but the concepts are the same...
Try starting from scratch:
- delete the job or jobs in Restrospect
- delete the Retrospect folder on your external drive (make sure you do not need anything from the backup before you delete it)
- configure new backup job. You want to run a simple disk backup, no fancy stuff with days of week etc. To test it, you might want to select only a handful of files to backup so that the full backup does not run for ages. Later, you can extend it to all your files.
- run the backup for the first time (full backup will be made)
- run the backup again and see if a new backup set is created in the REtrospect folder
- if it runs ok (the is, if only changed files are backed up), extend it to backup all your files
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by: FilipZahradnikPosted on 2008-01-14 at 20:13:50ID: 20659982
- Did the full backup run successfully at least once?
- Is your Retrospect full version or Express? (look into Help->About Retrospect)
- Did you set up the backup job yourself or was there some sort of a wizard?