Can't get Instant Scan to work - 10.1

[etracer]

Retrospect Server: 2010 Mac Pro 12 core, OS X 10.6.8, Retrospect 10.1.0 (220)

Client System: 2012 Mac Mini, OS X 10.8.3, Retrospect Client 10.1.0 (221)

 

The client has Instant Scan enabled and the RetroISA process is running. The scan index in /Library/Application Support/Retrospect/RetroISAScans has two files:

 

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 98268116 Mar 23 20:04 RetroISAScan-ED219444-DD36-3FFA-8354-791ABCC7F5E6.dat

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 256 Mar 23 20:04 RetroISAScan-ED219444-DD36-3FFA-8354-791ABCC7F5E6.inf

 

No matter what I do I can't get the backup of this client to use the Instant Scan. The backup log for the client never reports "Using Instant Scan". The filesystem scan phase takes the same amount of time if regardless of whether I have Instant Scan enabled or disabled on the client.

 

I have tried rebuilding the RetroISAScans entries on the client by stopping Instant Scan, deleting the files and then restarting Instant Scans. As expected the RetroISA process uses a lot of CPU time for a while and then successfully rebuilds the index. Still the backups don't use the Instant Scan capability.

 

Any ideas?

[David W Lee]

We recently updated http://retrospect.com/en/documentation/user_guide/mac10/instant_scan:

Starting from Retrospect 8.1.0 (266) for Windows and Retrospect 10.1.0 (221) for Mac, Instant Scan is only used for scheduled script activity, and not any activity manually started by clicking a Run button.

[David W Lee]

I should have elaborated. In light of customer interests and as well as concerns about Instant Scan, 10.1.0 (221) includes multiple improvements for:

- optimizations in processing file system change events

- throttling CPU consumption

Instant Scan processes file system changes about every 5 minutes. Considering use cases where customers make file system changes and quickly start manual backup to protect those changes, 10.1.0 (221) bypasses Instant Scan for such manually started back ups. We do have additional phases of further performance and resource optimizations planned for this area and will share more as we get closer to each phase.

[amkassir]

Starting from Retrospect 8.1.0 (266) for Windows and Retrospect 10.1.0 (221) for Mac, Instant Scan is only used for scheduled script activity, and not any activity manually started by clicking a Run button.

This is good to know.