rthille Posted November 5, 2004 Report Share Posted November 5, 2004 I've got a PowerMac G3 (Beige) with a LaCie U&I AIT-2 drive that I'm connected to via Firewire (PCI card). Retrospect is unable to handle swapping tapes in the AIT drive. Whenever I eject the tape from the Device Status dialog, the device status becomes 'unloaded', not "no media", and replacing that tape, or any other doesn't result in a status change. Power-cycling the tape drive or disconnecting and reconnecting the Firewire cable result in no change. The only way to get Retrospect to notice the new tape in the drive is to restart Retrospect. This makes it impossible to do backups that span tapes. :-( I realize that the Beige G3 is ancient, but the only reason I'm using it for this is that I've got some old DDS tapes (Sony SDT-9000 scsi) that I'm copying to the AIT tapes. I'd do it under OS-X, but under OSX Retrospect won't reliably talk to the SCSI drive (even via the supposedly supported Adaptec 2930U that I bought just for this...). Do I need to use an external firewire drive and a file-backup-set to read the SCSI DDS tapes under OS-9, then write the AIT tapes under OS-X? Any suggestions? I really haven't had much luck with Retrospect since upgrading to OS-X/5.x :-( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sonic Purity Posted November 9, 2004 Report Share Posted November 9, 2004 This is not the definitive answer you're looking for... just some tangential thoughts. I, too, have been having less and less luck with Retrospect as time goes by and the versions increment. By choice, i'm using an older Mac than the beige G3 (9699/350 here), Retrospect 5.1.177, and an external FireWire CD-RW via a PCI FW card. Can you update for free to Retrospect 5.1.177? Your description sure sounds like a Retrospect bug, and maybe it got fixed. I assume you're using Retro 6.x under OSeX (if not, from what i've read that is a likely source of trouble). I've not dealt with tape drives. What i can tell you from working at Apple in Mass Storage and dealing a lot with SCSI issues when the beige G3 was just being born is that, try as they might, Adaptec SCSI cards are rather hit-and-miss. We had a lot more consistent results with ATTO products (and the ATTO folks regularly visited Apple to ensure things were compatible. I never once saw anyone from Adaptec visit). Maybe you can buy/rent/borrow an ATTO card that others report works with Retrospect under X on whatever Mac you're X-ing with. I like your idea of DDS->FW drive->AIT. At this point, anything that works and doesn't cost more money sounds like the way to go. ))Sonic(( not running OSeX yet, and not at all sure he'll use Retrospect when the time comes, given recent problems Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sonic Purity Posted November 9, 2004 Report Share Posted November 9, 2004 Make that a 9600/350 ))Sonic(( obviously failed to preview the post Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted November 17, 2004 Report Share Posted November 17, 2004 Hi Exabyte has released firmware updates in the last 6 months that resolved a number of issues. You might want to look into an update. Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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