Puzzled by ProActive Backups not working

[aekalman]

I'm a very-long-time (15+ years) Retrospect 6 for Mac user, attempting to migrate to Retrospect 12.5 for Mac.

 

In the Retrospect 6 for Mac days (where Retrospect Server was running), I would ping-pong two external drives, and whenever any one of them was connected, Retrospect would back up all of the machines listed in the (single) script to the connected drive. Quit Retrospect, remove the drive, connect the other one, re-launch Retrospect Server, and backups would then resume to the other drive. It was all pretty brainless -- as long as Retrospect Server was running and either one of the external drives was connected, "it just worked." I would retire drives after ca 12 months, add two new ones to the destinations of the script, and continue doing this. I think you get the idea ...

 

So, I am attempting to do this with Retrospect 12.5 for Mac, using ProActive Backup scripts. And it doesn't work.

 

I have one script, with multiple sources, and two Thunderbolt-connected external drives upon which I have two Disk media sets (call them A and B ).

 

With drive A connected and the script setup with multiple sources, two media sets (A and B as destinations, Backup source every 20 hours, scheduled to allow the backup to happen at any time (an iMac is dedicated to just running Retrospect 12.5 ... I reviewed this thread: http://forums.retrospect.com/index.php?/topic/151937-proactive-backup-with-custom-schedule-doesnt-run/), and pretty much default options, I started the script and watched it do around 500GB of backup to drive A (/ Media Set A). So far so good. I stopped, quit and re-started Retrospect during this, and I observed how it re-started the script and continued with the (proactive)backup of the sources listed in the script. So far, so good.

 

I then quit Retrospect, removed drive A (with media Set A), connected drive B (with Media Set B ,  re-launched Retrospect, and I get .... nothing. This is 48 hours after the script finished running ... since this is greatly in excess of the 20-hour backup period, and Media Set B is one of the listed Media Sets for the Proactive Backup script, I assume / expect that the Proactive backup will start right back up, an and start backup up the sources to this newly-connected external drive.

 

All of the Activities that are scheduled are scheduled as proactive backup (with dates of yesterday and today), the B Media Set is present and fine, the source are online, everything looks OK in Retrospect, but despite all of the sources being listed as Proactive Backup in Activities, Retrospect itself is (and remains) idle.

 

So, some questions:

 

1) Have I misunderstood how/why Proactive Backups are supposed to run? I simply want each machine backed up once per day, I don't care when it happens, backups need to be done to one of two Media Sets (each stored on a separate, removable HDD), and this all has to work very unattended / with minimal interaction from an operator (all that happens is the external HDD is changed each week). I assume that a proactive Backup script is the right way to do this in retrospect 12.5.

 

2) Is there a problem with assigning two removable drives with drive-type Media Sets on them, as the Media Sets associated with a ProActive Backup script? Assume only one drive will be attached to the Retrospect iMac at a time ...

 

3) Does Retrospect 12.5 not handle "interrupted backups" well, in terms of running scripts? One thing I notice (see attached screenshot, captured on December 26 at 12:02) is that the one machine whose backup did not complete successfully to Media Set A (Pumpkin [053b]) is the only machine that references Media Set A .... all of the other sources in the script are scheduled to backup to Media Set B (Pumpkin [052b]). I can say unequivocally that Retrospect 6 couldn't care less about problems on a destination ("Media Set"), and would ALWAYS backup up on schedule as long as a valid destination drive was connected ... Is this proactive backup script "stuck" because the one backup to media Set A was not completed successfully, AND only Media Set B is currently attached to the iMac?

 

I'm a bit disappointed / frustrated that Retrospect 12.5 does not work as intuitively or as (IMO) "blindly" as Retrospect 6 does / did .... so any insight into my problem is greatly appreciated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

20151226_RS_activities.tiff

[Lennart_T]

Retrospect 6 was an all-in-one application.

 

Retrospect 12 (and back, maybe even back to version 8, I don't remember) consists of two parts: The Retrospect Engine (that does the actual job) and the Retrospect user interface. I guess you just exited the user interface and did not stop the Engine before switching drives. Is that correct?

You should have better luck if you turn off the engine before removing drive A and then restart the engine after connecting drive B. 

System Prefs-->Retrospect is where to look. Here's a screenshot from version 9. It should look similar in version 12.

[Lennart_T]

To rectify the current situation, I would simply restart the Mac.

[aekalman]

Hi Lennart.

 

Thank you -- I had not considered that .. a restart of the iMac seems to have "restarted" the Proactive backup ....

 

Now I need to develop a clean way to do this, that my staff can repeatedly do ... :-)

 

 

Retrospect 6 was an all-in-one application.

 

Retrospect 12 (and back, maybe even back to version 8, I don't remember) consists of two parts: The Retrospect Engine (that does the actual job) and the Retrospect user interface. I guess you just exited the user interface and did not stop the Engine before switching drives. Is that correct?

You should have better luck if you turn off the engine before removing drive A and then restart the engine after connecting drive B. 

System Prefs-->Retrospect is where to look. Here's a screenshot from version 9. It should look similar in version 12.

Skärmavbild 2015-12-26 kl. 21.26.05.png