Can't access Backup Set [My Disk Name], error -1101 ( file/directory not found)

[peternlewis]

So what does this mean?

 

I just bought brand new 3TB drives, and am sporadically getting these errors. The backup drive is permanently mounted, and after getting this error, it will proceed on to another backup and backup to the same backup disk without problems. How can it not find a backup directory on a mounted volume?

 

Please note, I do love Retrospect. I've used Retrospect since the early '90s (with a long dark break in the middle. I just want it to work reliably and cleanly and hopefully reporting problems helps that. But only if they are actually fixed of course…

[Lennart_T]

How can it not find a backup directory on a mounted volume? 

Because the disk catalog is corrupt. Try running Disk Utility to repair the disk on both the destination member as well as the disk where the catalog file is stored.

[peternlewis]

This disk is fine, the volume is fine, both checkout with no problems in Disk Utility. The catalog and destination member are both on the same disk. And if the disk was corrupt, it would presumably stay corrupt, not work fine the next backup.

 

Its not impossible its an intermittent hardware failure, but its more likely a Retrospect issue than a hardware failure.

[Lennart_T]

It is recommended to have the catalog file on a separate disk from the data. (But that is not the cause of your problem.)

 

Are these USB disks? USB is not reliability itself. (But I admit using USB disks as backup disks and have no problems at all using Retrospect 9.)

[peternlewis]

Aha, so I figured this out. I'd rotated backup drives and not updated the destination drive for this script, and this was the informative error message Retrospect gives in this case.

 

I still don't understand why the Proactive backup scripts can specify a set of potential destinations and work with whichever one is available and yet the non-proactive ones cannot - makes for unnecessary pain when rotating backup disks (exacerbated in this case by a rather opaque error message, though I'll grant you in hind sight "file/directory not found" makes a kind of sense).

 

Hopefully this will help the next person confused by this error message. And hopefully Retrospect will add an option to schedule backups on any of a set of available destinations.

[twickland]

And hopefully Retrospect will add an option to schedule backups on any of a set of available destinations.

Retrospect's scheduled backups have always required a specific list of sources and a destination for each backup event. When any one of these is unavailable, an error message is generated, which to me is probably the main advantage of a scheduled backup. If you just want to back up whoever is online to whatever media is available, proactive seems like an ideal solution.

 

To avoid having a script wait forever for the correct media, you can always specify a media request timeout in Retrospect's preferences.

[peternlewis]

@twickland I think you're confusing destinations and sources.

 

My scheduled back backs up my permanently available Macs every night. The problem is that I back up to a rotating set of three harddrives, and every time I rotate the backup harddrive, I have to adjust the schedule to match.

 

What I want is to be able to create a scheduled backup that will backup all my permanently connected Macs to whichever of the three backup harddrives is available, just like Proactive backups will backup whichever Mac they are backing up to *whichever* destination backup harddrive is available.

 

Yes, I could create three backup scripts, one for each destination backup harddrive, and each night two would error and one would work. Except then I would be flooded with errors for failing backups that I would have to ignore, and when the actual drive that is connected fails I would have to try to notice that there were three errors instead of two errors and a success. This is not a good solution.

 

And neither is having to change the schedule every time I rotate the backup drive.

 

The script already configures a set of acceptable backup destinations - all it needs is options for "Any Available" or "All Available" in the schedule (the former would backup to any selected backup destination that was currently available, and the latter would sequentially backup to each of the selected backup destinations that were available - either or both would work for my case).

[Lennart_T]

I think Twickland knows what he is talking about, also in this case.

 

If you changed your destinations on a regular basis, you should be able to create one script with three schedules. One schedule that matches the presence of each disk.

 

If you change your destinations on an irregular basis, you must use Proactive backups.

 

I would not hold my breath for the options for "Any available" or "All available" to become available.

[peternlewis]

I don't change the backup disks on a consistent schedule so I can't create three schedules unfortunately.

 

I hadn't considered using Proactivate backups to work around the issue, but I suppose as long as all the backups fit within a nighttime time window, then that could work. Rather than scheduling the backups to start at 2am, I can just allow the proactivate backup only between 2am and 6am. I'll give that a shot.

 

An no, I was not holding my breath on any given feature (although Retrospect are better at supporting feature requests than some companies I deal with, but they still have a long way to go).

[peternlewis]

Turns out Proactive Backups did not work at all well for this situation.

 

I'm not sure why. I have two Macs (the server and another desktop) that are permanently connected, permanently on, permanently awake. I setup a Proactive Backup with a tag source that is these two Macs, destination set to all my backup disks, and set to proactively backup every 12 hours from midnight until 6am. I figured that would backup both Macs at midnight each night, but that is not what happened.

 

The first night it backed up around midnight, the next night around 2:30am, the next night around 4:30am, and then it didn't backup again after that. No idea whats up with that, but clearly either I am very confused about how the Proactive Backups should work for permanently connected devices, or some part of the UI flummoxed me (it would hardly be the first time Retrospect did that) or Retrospect is simply buggy in this usage.

 

I went back to scheduled backups, I'll just have to remember to change the schedule each time I change backup drive.

[Maser]

I've found that proactive backup times for always-on computer "drift" (and have done this forever -- and drift is worse if you have multiple proactive backup scripts running concurrently).   I can set a server to backup at 2:00 a.m. on Monday (one backup every day) and by the end of the week, it will have drifted to starting the backup on the next Monday to 3:30 a.m.

 

If you want it to *always* trigger at a specific time -- don't use a Proactive script.

 

Proactive scripts are great for laptops and things that aren't on 24x7

[peternlewis]

Yes, that was my experience, except it seems to have drifted out of the time window for the script and then given up (maybe a week later it would drift back in the other side?).

 

As above, I tried to use Proactive to get the "backup to any destination" feature which is not available in scripted backups (for reasons I can only assume are that Proactive was created later with the feature and scheduled backups were never updated with the feature).