Backups kept forever?

The laptop in the house is backing itself up to my desktop PC, which is
the hub PC.

In the backup plan for the laptop PC, it is set to Automatic, Daily, with
a network share on my desktop PC set as the target.

It appears that the first backup is a full backup, unless you say
otherwise, and the rest of the backups (from now until the end of time)
will be incremental backups.

In the network share folder, I see a bunch of 50 MB Zip files. I'm
guessing that OneCare doesn't have any way to delete files FROM this
backup that have been deleted from the laptop PC.

There is 75GB of backup data on my PC in the backup folder. It's a very
large disk drive, so 75GB is not a problem, but one full backup with
incremental backups done from now until the end of time is not a good
backup strategy.

I should be able to set the backup plan as something like "full weekly,
incremental daily, keep for a month". Maybe Microsoft wanted to simplify
things and not expose this level of control to the user, but...
eventually the hard drive on the hub PC WILL fill up, since the
Outlook.pst file on the laptop gets backed up every day.

Not having any provision to weed out erased files, or remove old versions
of the backed-up files, makes OneCare not really suitable as a whole-
house backup system. I know there are other ways to back up a computer
(I am a computer programmer, after all), but I am surprised that this
backup is so poorly structured. And I was even in the beta for OneCare
2! I just didn't realize it worked like this (incrementals forever!).

I'm doing another full backup from the laptop now. I didn't see any way
from the GUI on the laptop to delete the earlier backups. Did I miss
something? Is there a way to delete the older backups from the GUI?

Any comments? Do many people seriously use OneCare backup to a network
location on a hub PC like this, and if so, what do you do about the ever-
growing backup files?

Thanks.

David Walker

David Walker <none@xxxxxx> wrote:
David, this is indeed a feature that is woefully missing from OneCare - a backup
cleanup feature or management feature. Hopefully, it will make it to the product
in the near future.
The original design for OneCare backup was to only support CD/DVD. In the haste
to add other destinations, the management of the space required for backups was
not a feature that made it to the product - yet.
I haven't seen OneCare do it yet, but it used to require a new full backup
annually. That may have gone away.
In the meantime, your only recourse for space management is to start a new full
backup and then delete the old backup set - manually.
http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsO...98096&SiteID=2

-steve

--
Stephen Boots sboots@xxxxxx
Microsoft MVP - Windows Live
Windows Live OneCare Forum Moderator
http://forums.microsoft.com/windowso....aspx?siteid=2