Why is Retrospect keeping my USB drive awake?

[john_gregg]

All,

 

I recently installed the Retrospect 8 trial. I've muddled through the bugs and lack of documentation and have it backing up the way I want it. However, I've noticed that even when idle, it's poking my backup USB drive. Every 5 minutes, the drive starts to spin down, but I don't think it even completely spins down before I hear a slight click and up it spins up again. I killed the Retrospect engine and the drive soon spun down and stayed spun down.

 

With Retro 6, this didn't happen. The drive was almost always asleep until the nightly backup ran.

 

How can I fix this? With this behavior I think it's only a matter of time before it kills my backup drives.

 

I'd rather not force the drive to stay awake all the time.

 

thanks

 

[Mayoff]

That is an interesting observation. I think it is expected because the engine is running all the time, but I will log a bug anyway for this.

[rhwalker]

Do you have any Proactive backup scripts?

Or just scheduled scripts?

 

Russ

[john_gregg]

Just one scheduled script for now.

 

thanks

[rhwalker]

Just one scheduled script for now.

Then it's very odd that this is happening.

 

You haven't provided any details about your configuration (version of Mac OS, your hardware, and, especially, how much RAM you have). Could you please provide those details?

 

I'm wondering if Retrospect engine isn't sleeping for five minutes (could be normal) then, on wakeup, is having to be paged in because you don't have enough RAM for all the pages to stay resident.

 

What does your memory usage look like in the Mac OS X activity monitor while this is happening?

 

Also, what does the output of top (in terminal) show? Any interesting activity?

 

Russ

[john_gregg]

24" iMac, 2.16GHz C2D, 3GB, 10.6.2. I typically have a gig or so free, so paging isn't an issue.

 

As I mentioned, I didn't have this problem with Retro 6. The only thing that changed is that I installed 10.6 and decided to try Retro 8.

 

thanks

[rhwalker]

Ok, and you've got sufficient RAM. It's just something odd for the programmers to investigate then.

 

Here's a thought for a possible workaround: If the USB volume is only used for backups, try unmounting it unless backups are happening.

 

Russ

[Mayoff]

We could not reproduce this issue.

 

What version of 8 are you using?

 

the only way i can get it to spin down is to enable "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" in System Prefs>Energy Saver > regardless if retro is running or stopped;

[ijhammo]

I had the exact same problem with my Highpoint Raid Array. I went highpoint specifically because it can sleep the drives - unlike the LSI 3Ware cards. The raid set is purely for data and retrospect was installed on a separate OS disk.

 

After installing the Retrospect 10 trial it never went to sleep. I even moved the whole array to another Mac Pro just to be sure and had the exact same behavior. I used "sudo fs_usage -f filesys" to check the activity to the disk and sure enough it was the retrospect agent keeping the drive awake.

 

I am going to have another crack at getting it working as I desperately need a backup solution that can use multiple hard disks to create a media set as my Raid set is 21TB

[Hofstede]

I think it is the Instant Scan feature that is causing this, it wil scan the external drives. Try to exclude the USB drive from Instant Scan. I mentioned before on this thread that Instant scan should by default not automatically include external drives in its scans.

[Mickel]

I think it is expected because the engine is running all the time