Completed activity runs forever

[gasser]

Retrospect says I have a backup activity running, but the status in the summary tab says "Execution completed successfully", even though the little wheel next to it is still spinning. It has been in this state for 10 hours. What could be happening?

 

FWIW, this is my first backup onto the second member of a 2-disk media set.

[Lennart_T]

Have you tried quitting the console and starting it again?

[gasser]

Yes, I did, but it didn't help. The activity is still shown in running state even though it "completed successfully". Worse, my next backup (onto a different media set) is queued up behind it, waiting for the activity to finish.

[Lennart_T]

Try restarting the computer where the engine is running.

If you can't do that (if it is running other critical software), stop and restart the engine. System Preferences-->Retrospect.

[gasser]

A reboot seems to have fixed the problem, mostly. My next activity started after reboot and the ""Past Backups" shows the completed backup that was hung. However the actual activity that was hung doesn't show up in any of the lists, so I can't for example view the log of it.

[kswisher]

I have had similar problems where a hung activity dissapears from the activity list after re-boot. I assumed it had something to do with deleting the catalog file after stopping the engine. Apparently not. (I delete the catalog as otherwise the hung grooming process would re-start and hang again when re-starting the engine.)

[David W Lee]

Morrie and Swish, when such issue occurs, do you see anything unusual in Retrospect's operations log after restarting the Engine?

[gasser]

No, I don't see anything unusual in the log, except for the message:

 

Member skipped: "1-Offsite 3 TB"

This is presumably because I didn't mount the first member of my media set, because it was full. (It was backing up to the 2nd member when it hung.)

 

However, to change the subject, I see 3 of these messages after the reboot:

 

E-mail notification failed: error -597 ( mail server not found)

I don't know why it was trying to email me. In addition, when I go to to the email section of the preference panel and click "Send Test E-mail", it works fine.

[kswisher]

Morrie,

 

I don't see anything in the Retrospect log that even indicates that I started the grooming activity that dissapeared from the activities list. No other log entries until I stopped and re-started the engine. But I do have a number of system diagnostic reports shown in console from that time period. They have names like RetroEngine_2013-03-17-233052_MyName-iMac.cpu_resources.spin. One of them is time stamped a few minutes after I started the grooming process that hung. I have 21 of these reports generated in the last 30 days. The last four of these .ispin reports have been since upgrading to 10.1.0 (221) on March 21.

 

On the positive side, 10.1.0 (221) may have fixed the bug that caused the hang in the first place.