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Web page seems wrong KB page describing full disk accesses in Mojave 10.14 . States that the app (note that apps only are allowed). The article states, "Client: Please add /Library/PreferencePanes/Retrospect Client."

The screenshot has others shown... What's the right story and where do we find the described file(s)? Hint: not where it's stated or shown!

Oh, by the way how to install Instant Scan?

mojave_full_disk_access_client.png

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henry-in-florida,

I'm just a laggard who is still running Sierra.  However:

On my MacBook Pro client, under Preference Panes, there is a file named Retrospect Client.prefPane.

As far as Instant Scan for APFS on Mojave, read this post—as well as previous ones in that thread—and weep.

P.S.: As far as Full Access is concerned, see if you can read this Web page for Backblaze installation in Mojave—which may be password-protected (I had to sign up, even though I don't intend to use Backblaze).  If you can't read the page, the following is a paste—which may enable you to do the equivalent for the Retrospect application:

[begin paste]

Giving Backblaze Full Disk Access After Updating To Mojave

1. After updating to the latest client, open the Applications Folder. 

Applications_Folder.png

2. Open the System Preferences on your Mac by clicking the apple icon in the upper-left corner and select System preferences.  

mceclip0.png

3. Click Security & Privacy settings.

mceclip1.png

4. Select "Full Disk Access" in the left-hand column.

Screen_Shot_2018-09-24_at_10.10.01_AM.png
5. If necessary, click the lock and enter your Mac's username and password to allow you to make changes.

6. Drag the Backblaze app into the Full Disk Access location and release the Backblaze icon into it as show in the images below. 

BzApp_Permissions.gif

7. Restart your Mac. After reboot, once Backblaze does a hard drive scan it should back up everything that the Mojave upgrade excluded and your backup should remain safe! 

 

**Note: If you are still having issues with the Mac Menu Bar Backblaze icon please click here for instructions.

 
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[end paste]

Edited by DavidHertzberg
P.S.: Because henry-in-florida has already read this post, put possibly-helpful Full Access instructions for Backblaze here
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henry-in-florida,

On second thought, you may have a problem if you are upgrading either your "backup server" or your "client" machine to Mojave without later upgrading your version of Retrospect to 15.5 Mac.  That would be because you have a situation analogous to what I've quoted below for Backblaze:

[beginning of quote]

Backblaze required an update to the app as well as a manual update of permissions. To download the update, I went to the menu bar, clicked the Backblaze icon (it looks like a flame), and selected “Check for updates”. An update to the latest version of the Backblaze app was quickly downloaded and installed. A short while later, a warning message appeared on my Mac (see screenshot below):

(A warning dialog from Backblaze stating that permissions are required)

(A warning dialog from Backblaze stating that permissions are required.)

Clicking Learn More directed me to this web page providing directions on how to add a specific component of Backblaze to the list of apps that get full access. This allows Backblaze to back up the Photos Library properly.

Backblaze and Carbon Copy Cloner are just two of the many third-party backup apps that require attention to work properly with macOS Mojave. If you use other backup apps on your Mac, be sure to make sure they’re working properly after the Mojave update. If they’re not, visit the website of the application developer for details on how to either update to a new version or change permissions for the app in System Preferences.

[end of quote]

The underlying problem IMHO, henry-in-florida, is that Retrospect Inc. (and possibly predecessor developers) have long made a practice of installing the real Retrospect app in a "seekrit location" that is not in the Applications folder.  Thus on my MacBook Pro "client" there is no Retrospect app in Applications, and on my Mac Pro "backup server" what's named "Retrospect.app" in Applications is the Console app—not the Engine app.  If you run the Retrospect installer the way they tell you, it updates the app in the "seekrit location" as well—which if you've already installed Mojave undoubtedly says to itself "Oh, he's got Mojave, I have to give Full Disk Access to the Engine/Client".

IMHO you're going to get Retrospect Tech Support to help you straighten this out on behalf of others as well as yourself.  Here's why and how to do that.

P.S.: You don't need Retrospect Tech Support to straighten this out, unless you're trying to install Mojave on "backup server" and/or "client" machines that have a version of Retrospect prior to Retrospect Mac 15.5.  If you're already running Retrospect Mac 15.5 on all your Mojave-upgraded machines, all you need to do is follow the instructions in this September 21st Knowledge Base article—which I just discovered.  Note that the article validates my "seekrit location" hypothesis.

 

Edited by DavidHertzberg
Added link to KB article as P.S., for those who may have already read this post
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"Security & Privacy" isn't accepting .prefPanes (Retrospect Client) or bundles (InstantScan) as valid file types, so you can't add them to the exception list. I guess "apps" really does mean apps -- at least for now.

I don't know if this is a GUI bug -- the pref pane doesn't think it can add a bundle but the underlying system would accept it if only it could be added -- or something more fundamental.

Even if it does work, as things stand you'd still have to forget and then re-add each and every client. So you might want to wait for the "upcoming (Retrospect Client) release (which) will eliminate the uninstallation step and preserve your client settings."

Nige

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2 hours ago, Nigel Smith said:

"Security & Privacy" isn't accepting .prefPanes (Retrospect Client) or bundles (InstantScan) as valid file types, so you can't add them to the exception list. I guess "apps" really does mean apps -- at least for now.

I don't know if this is a GUI bug -- the pref pane doesn't think it can add a bundle but the underlying system would accept it if only it could be added -- or something more fundamental.

Even if it does work, as things stand you'd still have to forget and then re-add each and every client. So you might want to wait for the "upcoming (Retrospect Client) release (which) will eliminate the uninstallation step and preserve your client settings."

Nige

Nigel Smith and anyone else upgrading to Mojave,

Since I don't work for Retrospect Inc., I didn't write the KB article or Retrospect Mac 15.5.  Since I also don't work for Apple, I didn't write Mojave.  And since I'm an old fuddy-duddy, I'm still booting Sierra—so I don't have this problem.

My suggestion would be to submit a feature request; here's why and how to do it.  Alternatively, if you're lucky the "upcoming (Retrospect Client) release (which) will eliminate the uninstallation step and preserve your client settings" will IMHO be out in Retrospect Mac 15.6 or 15.7 around December.  If Retrospect Inc. has to get Apple to fix something in macOS, the fix will IMHO come no earlier than Retrospect 16 next March.

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Quote

Nigel Smith and anyone else upgrading to Mojave,

Since I don't work for Retrospect Inc., I didn't write the KB article or Retrospect Mac 15.5.  Since I also don't work for Apple, I didn't write Mojave.  And since I'm an old fuddy-duddy, I'm still booting Sierra—so I don't have this problem.

My suggestion would be to submit a feature request; here's why and how to do it.  Alternatively, if you're lucky the "upcoming (Retrospect Client) release (which) will eliminate the uninstallation step and preserve your client settings" will IMHO be out in Retrospect Mac 15.6 or 15.7 around December.  If Retrospect Inc. has to get Apple to fix something in macOS, the fix will IMHO come no earlier than Retrospect 16 next March.

Well, I heard from Retro Support that Instant Scan will be going away. And as some have said on this thread, there is a new client coming that will fix the issue, not waiting for Apple to do anything further. At least that's the gist of my understanding from the conversation I had with support. Since then, I did work around the exclusions for now and have my client running w/o the exceptions, on Mojave. But no Instant Scan. They say that the speed issues have been worked around and will be completed without the need for Instant Scan functionality, which I never really liked anyway (CPU hog, among other issues). 

Henry

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21 hours ago, henry-in-florida said:

Well, I heard from Retro Support that Instant Scan will be going away. And as some have said on this thread, there is a new client coming that will fix the issue, not waiting for Apple to do anything further. At least that's the gist of my understanding from the conversation I had with support. Since then, I did work around the exclusions for now and have my client running w/o the exceptions, on Mojave. But no Instant Scan. They say that the speed issues have been worked around and will be completed without the need for Instant Scan functionality, which I never really liked anyway (CPU hog, among other issues). 

Henry

So now Retrospect Technical Support is admitting that Instant Scan is going away on Retrospect Mac 15. 

One problem is that Instant Scan for APFS doesn't work, which is apparently a backup-app-industry-wide problem—not just for Retrospect.

Another problem is that getting Instant Scan to work seems to be currently impossible if you're booting macOS 10.14, AKA known as Mojave.

But I suspect that what henry-in-florida is quoting RTS as saying is what a Greek named Aesop characterized as "sour grapes".:rolleyes:  Since I instituted Instant Scan 3 years ago, it's been saving me 8 minutes on each daily incremental backup of one drive, and about 40 minutes on each weekly Recycle backup of 3 drives (I'm actually backing up 6 drives on that weekly run, but 3 of them are on a Mac so old that its Client predates the introduction of Instant Scan).  Even if the speed improvements from the introduction of 64-bit API calls double or triple copying rates,  I don't believe the Instant Scan savings described in the previous sentence will become negligible.  And I don't care if Instant Scan hogs CPU time.

P.S.: Come to think of it, the first drive I back up weekly—which only contains about 15GB—on that very old Mac takes about 15 minutes before Retrospect 14 actually starts backing up its files (as shown by the LED on my Media Set drive starting to flash).  The CPU speed on that old Digital Audio G4 is 733Mhz, 27% of the CPU speed of the 2.7Ghz MacBook Pro that I back up daily.  Yet its Recycle backup-and-compare, adjusted for the 49GB contents of the HFS+ drive on my newer machine, runs at 54% of the speed for my MBP—despite the fact that the MBP's drive is an SSD.  And that includes the 15-minute preliminary Scan, which cannot be Instant because OS X 10.3—which the G4 boots—did not yet have FSEvents.  Considering that the weekly Recycle backup-and-compare of the G4 takes 2 hours, my guess is that eliminating Instant Scan will add about 10% to the time for each incremental backup of a modern Mac.  That won't be negligible for administrators with dozens of Macs to fit into a "backup window".

 

Edited by DavidHertzberg
Added P.S. discussing what the probable effect of eliminating Instant Scan would be
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There's clearly been an change in Mojave's behaviour since Retrospect published their instructions. I've had a google in case there's a way of adding non-apps via the command line, but no luck -- Apple's included tccutil allows you to reset privacy settings for apps, but not add or remove apps (or control panels etc).

As it stands, we're waiting on updates -- either from Apple, to re-enable the old "add a control panel" behaviour, or from Retrospect with an "app-ified" client.

We've already told our users to not update to Mojave without checking with us first so we can make sure they have other backup options in place (luckily they all will because we haven't started our RS rollout yet, but it's a good chance to check they are actually using those options!).

Nige

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51 minutes ago, DavidHertzberg said:

There's now a new 15.6 release of Retrospect, and a new version of the Knowledge Base article to go with it.

David,

Thanks for that info. Not quite what I was told but similar and seems to be the ultimate fix. Will try it soon.  

There have been a lot of interesting followups to my post. Thanks, all! I hope that Retrospect people were likewise entertained.  

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Just went to do the update. Found two issues with it. 

  1. While available from the Retrospect.com web site, there is no update notice in the old app download a new update. 
  2. While the text in the new KB version is correct but  the screen shot for the Client install in Privacy settings is incorrect. It should look like mine not theirs. I previously reported issues like this and Lo! Still a small issue on the new one... 

FYI...

 

Screen Shot 2018-10-16 at 08.44.48.png

Screen Shot 2018-10-16 at 08.44.48.png

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14 minutes ago, Nigel Smith said:

Should be this screenshot -- they've simply linked "engine" twice rather than "engine" then "client".

Henry, have you tried backing up the updated client yet? I still get a -519 error ("Can't track volumes"), but I'm assuming that's because I've only updated the client to 15.6, not the server.

Nige

 

Nige, 

Yep. Sorry I just posted a section of my window for you. It's the same. I had other stuff enabled. My client(s) are OK for awhile. One is running now with out an error. I have had clients that show up a -519 communications error where I've had to delete and re-add the client for unexplained reasons, however. 

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