Disk media sets can be moved

[Don Lee]

I just ran an experiment moving a disk media set to another location and contrary to the experiments I ran long ago (I think with Retro 8), these sets CAN be moved, but you have to be careful, and some of the choices are NOT obvious.

 

What I did is this:

 

I moved "atrash" to a different firewire disk. I moved both the catalog file atrash.rbc and also the "member", which is in the "Retrospect" folder in the same directory as the catalog file.

 

In the past, when I did this, I ran into two problems. First, any "edits" of the members would simply not work. That was apparently a problem that went away when upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6.x. The second problem was that it was not at all clear, when selecting or adding members what to select in the dialog box.

 

The structure of a disk set is like this for set "MSET":

 

 

    ENCLOSE->MSET.rbc->Retrospect->MSET->1-MSET->BExxxxxx.rdb

 

What I did today to move the set was to move the entire structure, but when you do that, and add it to retro's "media set" pane, it comes up "green" until you verify it, at which point Retro notices that the members are not where it expects them (in the old location).

 

What you can do to "move" the set is remove it from the media set pane in the console, and then press "locate" and find the catalog file in the new location.

 

If you do this, Retro will still show the media set as "green", until you verify it. YOu have to tell Retro that the member(s) have moved.

 

To do that, go to the media set pane, and press on the "members" tab. Click on the little pencil icon to "edit" the member.

 

Now comes the important and non-obvious part.

 

You would expect to navigate to the "1-MSET" folder, or maybe one of the BExxxxx.rdb files, or maybe to MSET inside Retrospect folder. Nope. You have to select the "ENCLOSE" folder (which I fine entirely non-intuitive).

 

Note that there is no feedback on this operation, you can choose those other folders and dismiss the dialog, and future attempts to verify the set will simply fail. It would be really nice if Reto provided some hints, documentation about this, or even highlighted the choices to make it less obscure.

 

The same is true of adding a disk media set member. If you select MSET or Retrospect folders, it will work, but it will nest the "member" inside other "members" and make hash of your structure.

 

I'm glad it works now. I'm glad I discovered that it works. I hope I was not being dense. I hope Retrospect will make it better.

[Don Lee]

It would be nice if Retro were smartened up on this. Either feedback on the edit operations or allowance for the intuitive selection of the actual "1-xxx" directory would be much better than the non-intuitive way this need to be done. These ops are fairly rare, but they do happen, and messing them up is a real pain.

[bdunagan]

Very true. We encounter these issues as well in house. We plan to improve both feedback and the selection process in a future release.