Retrospect 9 on Mountain Lion failing to recognize NAS volume in Media Set

[am6095]

I recently upgraded from Mac OS X 10.6 to 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and Retrospect 9 is intermittently failing to recognize the NAS volume that is used for a Media Set.

 

I run Retrospect client and server on the same machine (a MacBook Pro), and back up to a Synology NAS volume that is mounted via afp. Previously, under Mac OS X 10.6, this worked fine: Synology would mount the NAS volume automatically when it was time to do a backup, then unmount it when it was done. It didn't matter whether or not I'd also mounted the volume to my desktop.

 

Immediately after the upgrade of Mac OS X, Retrospect stopped recognizing the NAS volume, regardless of whether I had mounted it to my desktop or not. Nothing I could do would make this work, so I uninstalled and reinstalled Retrospect. After this, it started to work until the first time I unmounted the NAS volume and took the MacBook Pro away from my office.

 

What I see now is (thusfar) unpredictable behavior. I'll check on the status of a backup script and Retrospect says it is waiting on media, even though the Mac is connected to the network, the NAS is up, and the NAS volume is mounted to the desktop. I will navigate to the Media Sets window, open up the NAS media set to edit, close it out, and then Retrospect will proceed but with a log message:

 

 

!The Backup Set member "1-Media Set E" is corrupt or has data from another set.

 

Subsequent scripts will run fine. Suspecting something funny in the way the NAS volume was mounted, I opened up a Terminal window and saw multiple instances of the mount point (see the attachment).

 

Does anyone know if this is a problem with how I've configured Retrospect to mount the NAS volume, or a Synology problem, or a bug in Mac OS X Mountain Lion?

Screenshot.txt

[CallMeDave]

It didn't matter whether or not I'd also mounted the volume to my desktop.

 

Mac OS X does not allow two user processes to access the same remote volume at the same time.

Mac OS X does not allow two mounted volumes to have the same name (whether they are the same share point or different share points) at the same time.

Mac OS x will "protect itself" from having two volumes with the same name by appending a sequential number to the end of an already mounted remote volume's name.

 

Retrospect doesn't do anything dynamic in this regard; so if you have configured a Member of a Disk Media Set to be found at

/Volumes/Foo/

but after a restart you mount that same volume (so it's seen my OS X as /Volumes/Foo/) and you _THEN_ ask Retrospect to access the share point, it will be unable to do so; the name "Foo" is already taken, so OS X will only allow the volume to be on the path /Volumes/Foo-1/, which is _not_ the path Retrospect was configured to use. Result? Fail.*

 

So instead of believing that having it mounted on the Desktop and also used by Retrospect is something you have been able to do and therefore is something you believe it is possible to do, come to an understanding that Retrospect will not provide reliable behavior if you do that.

 

*hint that continuous attempts to mount the same volume might not be a good idea can be found in your 'mount' output:

 

/Volumes/DS XXX Backup

/Volumes/DS XXX Backup-1

/Volumes/DS XXX Backup-2

/Volumes/DS XXX Backup-3

[am6095]

Aha. So it sounds as though the path is to reboot, make sure that Retrospect is configured to find the volume at the "Backup" mount point, and make sure that the "Backup" volume never gets mounted to the desktop or via any means other than Retrospect? (And delete the Backup-# points to clean things up if Mac OS X doesn't handle that itself and I want to be neat and clean about it?)

 

Did this. Retrospect is now working properly. Thank you, CallMeDave!