Disconnecting Laptop Client in Middle of Backup?

[jethro]

Hi,

We're trying to see if Retrospect 8 can work semi-reliably for us on our trusty old G5 Server running OSX Server 10.4.11.

 

We setup a ProActive script to backup some folders on a laptop that is only connected to the office network during the day (we run master backups at night). But due to how insanely slow Retrospect 8 is, it looks like the initial backup may take several days (guessing 50-60GB need to be backed up initially).

 

- What happens if the client computer disconnects from the network and shuts down in the middle of a backup? Our backup can take several seconds to several minutes for a single file depending upon size.

 

- Can this cause Retrospect to crash or the backup to become corrupted?

 

Thanks. It's amazing how slow this runs. We're just hopeful that once the initial backup is complete, the incremental backups can get done in the few hours a day this client is connected.

[Lennart_T]

Retrospect 8 is designed for little-endian processors, like the ones from Intel. PowerPC is a big-endian processor. That means there is a LOT of byte swapping, which can explain some of your performance problems.

 

Is the client connected to a wireless network or a wired network. (Wired is preferred.)

 

Retrospect is designed to handle the situation when a client is disconnected from the network (for whatever reason). What happens is that the catalog file is updated with the files that were succesfully backed up before the disconnection. So the next backup will not copy them again (unless they have been updated on the client in the meantime).

 

What is the destination of the backup. (The destination is always some kind of "media set". A media set has "members", which may be tapes, local hard drives, server volumes etc.)