Can't back up host drive from virtual machine

[rhylton]

I have Retrospect 8.5 on my Windows 7 pc and I'd like to test Retrospect 10 before upgrading - I had problems with 9 and had to go back to 8.5.  I've used VirtualBox to create a Windows 10 virtual machine (I don't have a Windows 7 license to spare) and installed a Retrospect 10 trial.  I've used VirtualBox shared folders to give the virtual machine access to the host drives (the backup source and target) but the backup fails almost immediately after starting to scan the source volume.  The log shows "Error: Scanning incomplete, error -1010 (API request bad).".  Does anyone have any idea about what's gone wrong?  Has anyone successfully used Retrospect from a VirtualBox vm to back up a host drive?

 

Thanks,

Ron

[jotrago]

Since you are just testing, perhaps rather create an extra virtual disk or two in VBox and mount them in your Retro Test VM, and use those as sources and targets for your backup tests.

 

You could copy some of your files from host to VIrtual disk

 

I use VBox extensively and always mount my host home folder (linux) in my VMs. They have always worked reliably, although I have not actually tried running a backup on them.

[Scillonian]

Before I changed to a dedicated physical server for Retrospect I ran it in a dedicated VMware Workstation VM. In my setup the host machine had the Retrospect Client installed on it and was therefore a network client of the VM. I never used the shared folder feature in VMware Workstation because it quickly fails if pushed hard which applications like Retrospect do.

 

If you are familiar with networking the host and VM can communicate over a virtual network or for a simpler setup you can use the physical network.

 

I've experimented with Retrospect 10 Desktop on a Windows 10 physical machine and it appears to run without issue so far. (Windows 10 reliability is another thing.)