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Retrospect 11 silently dying


jschober

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Hi,

 

I've been a long time user of Retrospect, generally happy. I run it on a dedicated Windows 10 server to back up a series of network clients around the house, via both Proactive backup as well as some scheduled scripts. Since upgrading to Retrospect 11, I have a new problem: the Retrospect app just dies. No crash message or anything else -- when I check on the server, Retrospect just isn't running anymore. I suspect it's some sort of crash, because when I relaunch Retrospect and examine the History, I often see an entry for a backup that was probably in-progress at the time of the failure, but the log is empty (can't even be opened) with a listed duration of 00:00:00. AFAIK, this problem is new since I moved to Retrospect 11, and nothing else has changed on that machine (except probably some routine OS security updates).

 

Needless to say, this doesn't give me a warm fuzzy that my backups are reliable. Can anyone provide some advice about diagnosing and fixing this problem?

 

Thanks!

 

--Joe

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It isn't clear if it is the Retrospect engine that has crashed or the Retrospect console. The engine is the part that does the actual work. The console is the user interface that show what the engine is doing.

Check the Windows' Task Manager to see if the engine is still running.

 

Can you see anything in the Windows' Event Viewer between the last Retrospect log entry time and the time you see the backups no longer runs?

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For me occasional silent exits of Retrospect have been around from at least Retrospect 7. I have also seen it happen a couple of times when monitoring Retrospect while waiting for a job to complete. For me the exit is near the end of the backup job but before the notification email is sent and the logs updated. (I find it annoying that Retrospect only updates the logs after the job is complete.)

 

My suspicion is a flaw in Visual C++ 2005, which parts of Retrospect are based on, but only have circumstantial evidence for this.

 

 

It isn't clear if it is the Retrospect engine that has crashed or the Retrospect console. The engine is the part that does the actual work. The console is the user interface that show what the engine is doing.

Check the Windows' Task Manager to see if the engine is still running.

 

On Windows Retrospect is a single executable (retrospect.exe) so there are no separate engine and console components as on OSX.

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  • 6 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I'm running 11.5.0.190, and silent crashes started happening to me as well, consistently for 3 days straight during my nightly backup. In the Activity Monitor UI there's no log file. In the file operations_log.utx, it has this for the failed backup:
 
+    $[15]Retrospect$[16] version 11.5.0.190
    Launched at 12/2/2016 11:14 AM
        
        12/2/2016 11:16:32 AM: Compressing catalog file

 

In the UI I watched it try to backup the first client, then it exited unexpectedly.

 

Anyone have suggestions on how to fix this?  Everything was running fine prior to this problem.  Thanks!

 

 Rob

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Thanks for the response, Robin. I submitted the issue to support, but wanted to add that I got backups running again without crashing by doing a catalog repair "Recreate from disk."  There wasn't an error message suggesting the catalog was corrupt, but I gave it a shot and it seemed to work.

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We do have a bug in version 11.5 that can cause a crash in some conditions on Windows 10. Please contact support to confirm if you have the same issue. If you do, we can provide a bug fix.

 

 

It may also be on server 2008 R2 - as I've had 11 do it periodically - now 11.5 is doing it multilple times a day. 

 

The last on was when it was grooming a catalog file. I do not believe any backup jobs were running. 

 

Poof - it's gone. 

 

 

edit to add: 

Let me clarify - this is the Server application just 'going away'. 

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  • 3 months later...

Is this problem believed to be fixed in Retrospect 12?  I noticed this line in the release notes:

 

Resolved crashes related to memory issues on Windows 10 (#6456)

 

I don't know if the silent app exit is related to a "memory issue", but it'd be totally worth the upgrade cost just to have Retrospect be reliable again.

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