V16 Dashboard "non-responsive" even 1 hour after launching

[x509]

How can I reconfigure Retrospect to not use the Dashboard, when I'm running the Dashboard and it is completely non-responsive?

Until now, I have not used the V16 Professional Dashboard, because of performance issues with the V15 Dashboard. Last night I changed Retrospect preferences to use the Dashboard and then started up Retrospect last night to run my normal scheduled backups, which did work (because I checked file dates in Windows).  But the Dashboard was non-responsive, either dimmed out or displayed with a spinning blue Windows wheel.  I hibernated my system after the backups ran and restarted this morning.  Two hours later, the Dashboard is still non-responsive.  Or if I so much as click my mouse anywhere within the Dashboard window, it becomes non-responsive again. 

I'm comfortable editing the Windows registry, if that is necessary.

x509

[x509]

Now 2 hours and counting, and the Dashboard is still non-responsive.

[DavidHertzberg]

Oh my, x509, it appears you're back to the same situation I responded to here in a post last fall.

My first suggestion would be to follow whichever of the alternatives is appropriate from the first paragraph of that post.

My second suggestion would be to update your Support Case on the problem, but this time tell Support to tell Engineering that you'll go to Rod Harrison—CTO of Drobo and probably by virtue of that position now de-facto StorCentric "enforcer" at Retrospect formerly-Inc. Engineering—if you don't get some work-around in Retrospect Windows 16.5 (which I hear is due out around 20 September).   A snail-mail address for Harrison is :

Drobo

Attn.: Mr. Rod Harrison, CTO

1289 Anvilwood Ave.

Sunnyvale, CA 94089

However, if you are willing to enroll in LinkedIn—which I am not because of delete-finger tiredness—you should be able to get an e-mail address for Harrison there.

My third suggestion would be to "go with the flow", and setup the Web-based Management Console per this Knowledge Base article.  Of course I haven't had to do that because, as a Retrospect Mac administrator, I've had a perfectly-adequate non-Web-based Console since I upgraded to Retrospect Mac 12 (from Retrospect Mac 6.1 on a "backup server" machine that died in 2010) in 2015.

P.S.: In response to x509's post below, I'd think "royally pissed" would be expressed by the following emoji:

Edited September 1, 2019 by DavidHertzberg
P.S. showing possible emoji for "royally pissed"

[x509]

David,

Thanks.  It's now 9 hours and counting, and I still have that damn Windows "spinning blue circle."  We went out for a movie and dinner, and just got back.  I have this rule about no systems work past 9 pm, to avoid stupid, unforced mistakes.  But I will definitely read that post tomorrow morning and act accordingly.

At least the scripted backups are being run.  But I need to change one of the scripts tomorrow to point to a new dataset, and I also need to run some immediate backups during the day after heavy photo editing sessions.

Too bad there isn't an emoji for "royally pissed."

[x509]

David,

Thanks for having a better memory than I have about old posts.  😁

I followed all the links.  For some of the suggestions, the issue was that I could never actually Retrospect, so I couldn't change the preferences.  Catch-22!

However, I was able to start Retrospect directly, from a Windows cmd box.  (The old "DOS box.")  I turned off automatic start, etc., and now I have my Retrospect back.  The price to pay, such as it is, is that I need to restart Retrospect manually if/when I reboot my system.  But that's a small price to pay.

For me, a web-based console is total overkill.

x509

[DavidHertzberg]

x509,

My "better memory about old posts" is embodied in the Search box in the upper-right corner of the Web page for the Forums.  The Search box used to have more facilities before the Forums software was "upgraded", but—if you check-mark "Find results that contain... All of my search term words"—it's still usable.

AFAICT, a Web-based console is the best Retrospect Windows administrators are going to get; see the first paragraph of this section of the Wikipedia article.  AFAIK all the other backup applications whose "backup servers" run on Windows have such Web-based consoles, because Gates and Ballmer made a Retrospect-Mac-style non-Web console impossible starting with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.  My hope is that, since the StorCentric acquisition probably signals the failure of Retrospect Product Management's "go big or go home" strategy, StorCentric management will convince Product Management that EMC's venerable "soak the rich" strategy also isn't going to work any longer.  If my hope is realized, Retrospect Windows administrators will be able to set up a two-way Web console without paying for an additional license.  The alternative will be your "small price to pay" at every "backup server" reboot..

[x509]

David,

Reading that paragraph of the Wikipedia article, I remember some of those changes since I've been using Retrospect now for about 10 or 12 years now.  I have two reactions:  (1) Retrospect the product (and its customers) are probably better served if Retrospect is not an independent company, because I've "seen this movie before."  My "day job" is software product management, and I've watched a lot of companies over my career, and I've seen lots of companies, including past employers, that have been buffeted around by poor decisions as the marketplace around them changed.  (2) Multi-platform software, particularly software that has to run on servers and workstations, is really hard to develop.  I have direct job experience here.  All kinds of toolkits and very careful programming techniques are needed.  Once upon a time, I would have said that  programming in Java was the answer.  Now I think that an HTML-based console is the way to go, with HTML5 (and not Flash!!), so that the product, even Professional, needs to have a small embedded web server. If I were in charge a good part if not all of the UI, would be based on HTML5.  That would certainly simply development and testing.

I don't know that much about Drobo, except that it has some strong competitors like Qnap and Synology, but I do think that the Retrospect management, not just product management, needs a strong shakeup.  Having already written a strong letter twice now to Brian Dunagan, I think I've used my opportunities to speak directly to management here.  And I doubt my letters had any impact, other than getting a detailed response from Support.  Those letters just took too much time to write, so that the issues would be documented clearly.  Not a good use of my time.

For a while I was seriously considering replacing Retrospect with another backup solution.  And there certainly are enough products available.  Backup is a very mature market segment.  Some of them are simple-minded "imaging" programs that just maintain a copy of the current filesystem.  Some of them don't work across a LAN.  And some of them are 10X or more the cost of Retrospect and require an actual Windows server, which I don't need for cost and complexity reasons.  So rather than take all the time needed to try out alternatives for features such as scheduling, scripting, filters, etc., etc., which I all use in Retrospect, I've "made my peace" with Retrospect.  I will work to get it to work to address my needs, and work around the rough spots.  I'll try to benefit from new features and I'm interested in some sort of affordable cloud backup-of-backup, which is another topic altogether.  But overall, it has worked for me and I've recovered or restored files enough times now that it's worth the trouble.

x509

[DavidHertzberg]

x509,

DovidBenAvraham was editing the Wikipedia NetBackup article early this afternoon, to correct links he had put there because of the split-off of the Enterprise client-server backup article (which of course is based mostly on Retrospect features but made application-neutral).  In doing so he was reminded of NB's Web-based Management Reporting feature, to support which—based on our quick look—it is documented that a NB "backup server" has a small embedded Web server.

My guess is that in 2008 EMC's Retrospect developers, who were under tremendous management pressure, didn't have the ability to make or buy such an embedded Web server—and may have loathed that adding one would "embiggen" Retrospect Windows.  In fact what they eventually did in Retrospect 16 was to implement the Web-based Management Console as a hosted service (second paragraph); I have now been able to locate the name of the service provider—it's Salesforce Heroku.

I am in thorough sympathy with your views.  However I would strongly recommend against expressing them in these Forums; I've had posts deleted in the past by the head of Tech Support for the real reason that they were critical of management.  If you read between the lines of this WP article section, and also read its references,  you will understand why long-time employees of Retrospect Inc. have what used to be known among baseball players/fans as "rabbit ears".

Edited September 13, 2019 by DavidHertzberg
Found name of hosted service provider, put it in last sentence of 2nd prgf.; linked to definition of "rabbit ears" in last sentence of 3rd prgf.; more-precise link to Retrospect WP article

[x509]

David,

 

If Retrospect management wants to censor this post, there is nothing I can do about it.  To be clear, I'm not on on a "campaign" against Retrospect.  I'm more like, "Che sera, sera."  I'm just not a 100% happy camper customer.

So I looked up the term "rabbit ears."  I thought I knew baseball lingo, but apparently not enough.  Rabbit ears are not confined to Retrospect employees.  I've worked at companies (sometimes only briefly) where rabbit ears were important for "survival."  But that's not a good thing.  At such companies, they are very vulnerable when the job market picks up.

[DavidHertzberg]

x509,

As of 1 October 2019, the full-featured two-way Web-based Management Console I predicted in the second paragraph of this up-thread post is released in Retrospect Windows 16.5.  However, according to this brand-new Knowledge Base article, you'll have to pay for the Management Console Add-on to get it.  Yesterday I couldn't get anyone in Retrospect Sales to pick up the phone to tell me how much it will cost, and it's not yet in the Configurator.  Evidently Retrospect "Inc."  Product Management thinks this will only be of interest to larger organizations.

P.S.: Just before noon I got Werner, head of North American Sales, to pick up the phone.  The Web-based Management Console Add-On is US$49 for The Desktop Edition,  US$149 for the Disk-to-Disk Edition (which is the same as the Single Server Edition except without tape destinations), and US$499 for the Single Server and Multi-Server Editions.  Werner tried it last night to access his own "backup server" over the Web; with the Add-On he can do anything Retrospect Mac non-Desktop Console users have been able to do over their LANs.  The one Web-vs-LAN tradeoff is that two-way updating between the "backup server" and the Console is done only once every 60 seconds; Werner says the engineers tried reducing the delay, but found that Web traffic made that inadvisable.  I hope the $49 you'll save by not buying it, x509, will ease the ongoing minor pain of your "simple and effective" substitute solution.

P.P.S.: Thinking about what Werner said about Web traffic making faster-than-60-second response from the Management Console inadvisable, it occurred to me that the "traffic" Werner was talking about may be the Console's interaction with Salesforce Heroku's Amazon EC2 cloud-computing platform —here's a discussion.  Competing client-server applications have a small Web server within their "backup server"—so they don't need to interact with a cloud service, and Retrospect Mac's non-Web-based Console of course relies strictly on interaction between computers on the same LAN/WAN.

P.P.P.S.: On 16 October 2019 I attended a 45-minute webinar "Manage Backups from Anywhere with Retrospect Backup 16.5".  The demonstration of Granular Remote Management, conducted by the head of Retrospect Tech Support, showed a response time for the Web-based Management Console that seemed to be a lot faster than once-every-60-seconds. It's still not in the Configurator (I think Retrospect "Inc." Product Management is still thinking of it as a tool for Partners), but Sales told me it only costs an additional US$49 for the Desktop Edition.  If I were administrating Retrospect Windows, I'd pay that—for a Web-based Management Console that seems to be about as good as the non-Web-based Retrospect Mac Console I now use—instead of learning a Windows Task Scheduler without Retrospect facilities.

P.P.P.P.S.: On 25 October 2019 I phoned the head of North American Retrospect Sales, who did part of the narration at the webinar.  He confirmed that Granular Remote Management really has a response time for the Web-based Management Console as fast as shown.

Edited October 26, 2019 by DavidHertzberg
P.S.: Got prices & capabilities of Management Console Add-On from Sales; P.P.S.: possible explanation why Web-based Management Console can't have sub-60-second response; P.P.P.S. & P.P.P.P.S: Granular Remote Mgmt. shows sub-60-second response time-I'd buy

[x509]

Since my home LAN is not exactly a "larger organization," I certainly won't be paying for it.  I have managed to work around the issue of the completely non-responsive console.  Not pretty, but it has the benefit of being simple and effective.