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Everything posted by rhwalker

  2. rhwalker

    Script Schedule

  3. rhwalker

    Engine Crashing...again

  4. rhwalker

    Engine Crashing...again

  5. rhwalker

    Engine Crashing...again

  6. rhwalker

    Engine Crashing...again

  7. rhwalker

    Media versus thorough verification

  10. rhwalker

    Client now showing volumes

  13. rhwalker

    Retrospect 8 and threads

  16. rhwalker


    This is a case where it helps to read the documentation. You stopped reading too soon. From the Roxio Retrospect 8.2 Read Me:
  17. rhwalker

    Exporting settings to move to another computer?

    This particular topic has cropped up again and again over the years. The magic phrase to remember is "Moving Retrospect" - that's the only clue in the User's Guide index, unless you have a photographic memory and can recall every page of the manual (I don't and can't). I seem to recall that the needed files are in different places for W95, XP, Vista, and W7. There was either an email post on the retro-talk list or in these forums a year or two back by one of the Retrospect people, giving the exact search order of where Retrospect looks for the various files. Sometimes it gets confusing if there are multiple copies of the files floating around, figuring out just which one is being used. Russ
  18. rhwalker

    Just about had enough....

    Ok, then it's possible that the problem is related to the Leopard (or more restrictive) Snow Leopard "application firewall", which is different from the standard ipfw. You haven't provided any details of your OS environment, so it's not possible to speculate on the problem or its solution. Whether by updates / upgrades, or for whatever reason, there may be a software firewall in play on one or both of the problematic computers. Without any configuration information, no way to tell. Russ
  19. rhwalker

    Exporting settings to move to another computer?

    You haven't provided the specifics of your environment (Windows version, Retrospect version, etc.), so it's not possible to give you a "cookbook" answer that would work in your setting. However, the answers to your questions are yes (it's possible) and no (you don't have to set it all up again). It's even documented. See, for example, page 272 ("Moving Retrospect") of the Retrospect Windows User's Guide. Here's the link: Retrospect Windows Users Guide Russ
  20. rhwalker

    Just about had enough....

    To aid you and/or your network person in diagnosing this issue, you might want to try the little multicast diagnostic that one of the Retrospect GUI engineers wrote: Multicast Ping on a Mac It takes Retrospect out of the loop when trying to figure out what is happening. Russ
  21. rhwalker

    Wasting tape

    There are three possible explanations, and it's unclear from your testing which is happening: (1) Retrospect 8 is writing to the tape in uncompressed mode. This bug has been reported before. (2) Retrospect 8 is causing larger inter-block gaps on the tape due to the tape drive's data pipeline becoming starved (the drive will increase the inter-block spacing in such situations to prevent "back hitching" - rewind and get a running start again for next block) to keep the drive in streaming mode. (3) Retrospect 8's tape error routines are too sensitive, and are giving up, believing that the tape is bad when, in fact, it's just a soft (correctable) error. Issue 1 can be tested by using the Exabyte (Tandberg) diagnostics to erase the tape into VXA-2 compressed mode before using the tape with Retrospect. Blank VXA-2 tapes, for compatibility, indicate that they are uncompressed. This bug has been seen before (and fixed) with Retrospect 6, and might have resurfaced with Retrospect 8. I always barcode and pre-label blank tapes, so I wouldn't have run across this issue, but you might test. Issue 2 can be tested by running on hardware that is not compute bound. I would expect such large inter-block gaps if you are running on a G5 PPC, because that architecture has to do all of the byte-swapping to fix things up for Retrospect 8's Intel-native (little-endian) format. You don't say what your underlying hardware is. Retrospect 6, which was quite mature and optimized, didn't have this problem because there wasn't the byte-swapping issue (Retrospect 6 was PPC optimized for big-endian). Also, I've never used the Firewire version of this drive, only the SCSI version, so I don't have a clue whether there is a performance penalty (whether because of Firewire I/O speeds or because of overhead with Retrospect's Firewire driver interface). Don't know whether Retrospect 8 has been optimized for speed yet - right now, it just "crashes quickly". Issue 3 is harder to test because you will have to get error-free transfers. Use new tapes, use a cleaning tape before each backup session. This issue, if the problem, can only be fixed as Retrospect matures, if that happens. Russ
  22. rhwalker

    Media versus thorough verification

    You misinterpret what a compare mismatch means. It means exactly that the data version retrieved from the media set (backup set) doesn't match the data version retrieved from the source. No more, no less. Usually that means that the file changed since backup, but not always. For example, RAID 5 issues can cause successive reads of data to be different (an explanation is far beyond the scope of this forum), as can uncorrected memory errors, I/O channel errors, bit errors in tape or disk media, etc. In short, it doesn't mean that the file on the source changed; it only means that data retrieved from the source doesn't match data retrieved from the backup. Not true. The data in the backup set (um, media set) just doesn't compare with the data read from the source. Either or both could be changed. You don't necessarily have the correct data in the backup set. Again, see above. Your assumptions are wrong, causing your conclusions to be wrong. Russ
  23. rhwalker

    Upgrade for Retrospect 7.7

    See my response to your duplicate posting in another thread here: Is it possible to use the old back up that was creaed to 7.6 to 7.7 version Russ
  24. I suggest that, before you do the upgrade, you study the EMC Retrospect 7.7 for Windows Read Me: Many people have discovered problems with the Retrospect 7.7 upgrade, and have been unable to easily go back because of this, um, feature. I suggest you review the comments in the Retrospect for Windows forum on this point. Russ
  25. rhwalker

    Disk vs File media options

    You might want to RTFM. Retrospect 8 disk media sets are completely different from V6. And it's not one large file in R8. Russ