'Error -51 File Not Open' prevents Duplicate from executing

[bobnospam]

I've been duplicating my Mac HD to my external firewire LaCie drive, on a regular basis, for many months. I use "duplicate" instead of "backup" because it gives me a complete, incremental clone of my Mac HD with files and folders that can be directly accessed, rather than creating a Retrospect Backup that requires "restore" to be useful.

 

Suddenly, however, Retrospect chokes within the first several seconds of the Duplication procedure, reporting 'error -51 - file not open' (pointing to files on the Mac HD). The target drive has 125 GB free...

 

 

Dantz Support has no informationn on 'error 51'. Suggestions welcome on how to fix this and get my Duplicates going again.

 

- BobNoSpam@twcny.rr.com

[CallMeDave]

Quote:

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Suddenly, however, Retrospect chokes within the first several seconds of the Duplication procedure, reporting 'error -51 - file not open' (pointing to files on the Mac HD)

 

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Perhaps you could point _us_ to some exampes of the files involved?

 

Dace

[bobnospam]

It would be helpful if Dantz could add to their product manuals, and add to the knowledge base, a range of possible causes and some hints on how to handle this vague error message.

 

In this case, the error message was confusing, and the error log appeared to be suggeting that there was a problem on the source HD.

 

However, it turned out that the external firewire target drive's directory had somehow become damaged and was not completely repairable by Disk Utility. Reformatting the target drive fixed the problem.

 

Here is how the error log looked - it kept identifying files on the source HD that it 'can't write' that 'were not open', giving no clue that the problem was actually on the target drive, other than to suggest that they 'could not be written':

 

Can't write file “User Guides And Information”, error -51 (file not open), path: “Pbook HD/User Guides And Information”.

Can't write file “var”, error -51 (file not open), path: “Pbook HD/var”.

Can't write file “-DS_Store”, error -51 (file not open), path: “Pbook HD/Applications/-DS_Store”.

Can't write file “.DS_Store”, error -51 (file not open), path: “Pbook HD/Applications/.DS_Store”.

Can't write file “.localized”, error -51 (file not open), path: “Pbook HD/Applications/.localized”.

Can't write file “_DS_Store”, error -51 (file not open), path: “Pbook HD/Applications/_DS_Store”.

Trouble writing folder Address Book.app, error -51 (file not open)

2005/05/26 7:31:19 AM: Execution incomplete.

Remaining: 106404 files, 17.7 GB

Completed: 30 files, 90.1 MB

Performance: 39.1 MB/minute

Duration: 00:02:19 (00:00:01 idle/loading/preparing)

Quit at 2005/05/26 8:00 AM

 

Hope this helps somebody...