Advice on 2-stage backup to offsite storage.

[cheese2]

Thanks guys.

I despise Retrospect but the 30 revisions thing is not negotiable (I'm lucky it's not 60+ actually) This may be geting off topic a little but do you know if the retrospect client will auto-mount a disk image for backup the way SD does? I have never tried it, but my feeling is that only the main application can do this, and in my case its running on the offsite server not the onsite server where the images are.

I guess there are two things that could help out here. One is if SD could back up to a network share directly instead of an image on a share. Then, Retrospect client could access the files individually without needing anything to be mounted first.

The other approach would be to have SD be able to back up to a set of images: a master containing the full original backup and subsequent "revision" images containing just the files that have changed since the previous backup. In a perfect world, I could even pre-specify how many "revision" images were in the set and the oldest would auto-expire. The contents of the expired image would then be re-copied to the newest image if they were still present on the system being backed up, thus preventing my backup storage being filled with old deleted data. I can see how this would make restoring an entire volume more complicated, but SD would already know which image the most recent revision of each file is on because it put them there in the first place. Some sort of index file would probably need to be saved with the image set.

That is something I know Retrospect (theres that word again) cant do. At least not to anything other than tape (yuck!) and I would be willing to pay good money for software that can. Maybe it time for SuperDuper Enterprise Edition?