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Tiger Incompatibility


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Every time I run Retrospect (6.212) on my OS X Tiger server (10.4.1) I recieve an assertion error "elem.c-816". I recieve this error when backing up the entire machine and just the shared drives. The error appears near the end of the process (with 10% to go) but not at a specific point. I am initiating the process through a manual recycle backup. There are no other error messages in the log. Some things I have tried include turning off the file server, turning off Spotlight, removing the preferences, and removing the catalogs. Once after doing a recycle backup, I did a normal backup. The normal backup succeeded on the last 3 files. This problem started as soon as I upgraded to Tiger. This is an older server (G4 733 MHz, 512 MB RAM) with a HP SureStore DAT 40 tape drive connected with SCSI. The system worked fine before the Tiger upgrade, and is handling it's light office load just fine. At this point Retrospect is not useable for me in Tiger. I will try a disk image backup for a while in hopes that an upgrade (beyond 6.212) will come out to fix the problem or maybe someone has a suggested fix.

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I upgraded from Panther. I didn't know there was any real problem with Adaptec cards under Panther. I certainly didn't have any problems. If that is the problem then I can look at fixing it. Although I find it odd that the backup process works for more than an hour and then just fails.

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I've been using Retro since they wrote it for the Mac, when '90±?, thru upgrades and purchases when I let it go a little too long. It's always functioned flawlessly, I never needed nor asked for tech support.

 

Purchased v6.0.178 last year for new PMac DP G5 and PBook 12. It too worked perfectly thru 10.3.9. I have no older cards nor scsi devices just WD Raptor boot drive in the G5 and a couple of WD 250 firewire externals.

 

Along came Tiger! I waited 'till June to buy in. Upgrade Retro to v6.0.212. Oh, nuts!

 

-821 errors – excluded spotlite in the selectors – things were looking better – B/U's almost done – now an assertion chk. failure at "tree.c-3444"! Anyone seen this failure?

 

What's going on with Apple & Dantz?

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Hi

 

Atto has been very good with supporting thier cards. I suspect they will continue to do so. Adaptec gave up and stopped writing drivers for OSX in 2002.

 

Future SCSI support depends on Apple and the SCSI card manufacturer.

 

Retrospect will work with any SCSI card that reliably communicates to backup devices. At the moment the only after market cards that do that in OSX are from Atto.

 

Thanks

Nate

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I bought an Atto UL4S SCSI card and with their help located my tape drive. Retrospect sees the tape drive starts the backup and then gives the same error I started with. I am doing the exact same thing as before, but instead of getting 90% through the backup I only get 10% through the backup. Superficially it appears that the ATTO SCSI card is worse than the Adaptec card. Is there any solution to the original problem with an ATTO card?

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Hi

 

Make sure you have driver version 3.20 installed if you are using OSX 10.3 or above. Then use the Atto SCSI utility to drop the sync rate to 20DT or 40 DT. That is still faster than your tape drive can run so you probably won't see a performance hit.

 

If you still have trouble try turning off command queueing.

 

Thanks

Nate

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Should I down grade the driver from 3.4? When I said that I had Atto's help in locating the tape drive they gave me detailed instructions in how to drop the sync rate and turn off the command queue. Following those directions I have dropped the Sync Rate to 40 (20) ST and turned off command queuing. Those changes allowed me to access the tape drive. Should I change the sync rate and command queuing to something else? I am getting the previous error with the settings I just listed.

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Hi

 

No - don't downgrade. I wasn't aware that Atto had released a newer driver.

Your current settings should work.

 

Have you tried a new cable and terminator? It really sounds like there is a low level communication problem with the drive.

 

Thanks

nate

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No I have not tried a new cable and terminator. I hadn't thought of this being a hardware problem since the hardware had been working for years before the upgrade. I do not have an extra terminator and cable lying around. Do you have a suggestion for verifying the idea that this is a low level communication problem? Is there some way for Retrospect to provide us with that information? I am considering testing out Bru to see if it has a similar problem. That would let us know if the problem is something other than the backup software.

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Bru has been successfully backing up my harddrive for the last couple of hours. It is through with one 20 MB tape and working on it's second. I will post the results when it finishes, but so far it hasn't had any problems with the SCSI card or tape drive.

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It appears that Bru has no problems with the hardware or for that matter, backing up the system.

 

I have found another cable and will try that when I get a chance. I am doubious about a cable changing anything since Bru doesn't mind the old cable and the old cable worked for years with Retrospect.

 

I have not tried changing the command queueing or the sync rate while running Bru. Any of these tests take a couple hours and I expect changing those parameters would cause a failure. Without those parameters set the tape drive is not visible to the OS. The need to set the sync rate down is likely due to the old tape hardware being used in a much newer SCSI environment.

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Derek,

 

I have not gotten Retrospect to work. My investigation into Bru leads me to believe that the user interface is not as pretty as Retrospect. The interface looks more like a Unix interface, which is actually just fine for me. I have spent years working on Unix machines. I don't know yet whether the functionality is as good as Retrospect with regards to scheduling and restoration. All of the extra details like interface and scheduling are less important than a backup.

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I have just completed another test. This time I setup an immediate backup to a file. The test failed with the same error as always: "elem.c-816". I will let the scheduled backup for this evening try to run over the new SCSI cable, although the above test is a good indication that the problem has nothing to do with SCSI.

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Yes, re "Assertion check at 'tree.c-3444' " I keep getting it, near the end of a 2+ hour backup.

 

I don't get it the second time around, if I first run Disk Utility to repair the disk and to repair permissions, but wasting the first backup attempt, then ca. 30+ minutes with Disk Utility, then re-running Retrospect 6.0.212 (I'm running Tiger OS 10.4.1) means that I'm, every few days, losing upwards of 6 hours of access to the computer.

 

When I plug 'tree.c-3444' into the Dantz support site for tech info, what I get is a generic memo that says to repair the disk.

 

The help we need is some guidance about what causes this error to recurr randomly and what we may do to forestall it.

 

Tom Brewton

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Retrospect has started working again without reason. The new cable failed utterly but the old one appears to be working. I have successfully completed one recycle backup and one normal backup. I will of course keep an eye on the backups to see if they continue to work.

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I am having constant problems with Retrospect 6.0.212 since upgrading to Tiger Server 10.4. This software, tiger and retrospect, is presently utter garbage. I really hope us paying customers don't have to wait until the end of the summer for these people to finally fix the bugs in the programs that we have paid hundreds of dollars for! Sorry to forum readers if I sound heated but I have about had it with this crap, if Apple or Dantz is reading this - TAKE NOTE!!!!!

 

My server is using Tiger and the latest "tiger compatible" version of Retrospect, along with the latest driver update. I have an ATTO UL4S card, the computer is a dual processor 1ghz quicksilver 2002 model. I have updated to the latest driver for Tiger from ATTO's website, version 3.4. That got rid of the elem.c errors I was having during backups but now Retrospect is just crashing completely and giving no error message, and the Console has no record of it (that's amazing!). I've already done the other fixes that have been suggested such as the spotlight exclusion (I've even completely disabled Spotlight via the command line to get around this crap, no such luck to my problems). As suggested I've gone into the ATTO config tool and turned off command queuing and dropped the sync rate to 40 DT. We'll see if this works but I have no faith that it will.

 

Apple and Dantz both, but especially Apple, are causing me to lose my hair!!!!!!!!!! bastards.

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I am getting the crash with no error message as well, backing up to a file on a Firewire hard disk. I didn't have any problems until the upgrade to Tiger. Upgrading to Retrospect 6.0.212 didn't seem to help at all. I can back up my external firewire hard disk to a second external firewire hard disk, and can back up some data and application folders on the internal drive without trouble, but I can't seem to get backups that include the Library or System folder. Use of Disk Utility and TechTools Pro to verify disk file and directory integrity didn't help.

 

My wild guess is that the new features in the Tiger disk formats aren't being used by anyone but Apple yet. Attempting to back up Library or System shows Retrospect some new data structures it isn't used to, causing it to choke.

 

But as I'm all firewire, I can suggest your problem isn't SCSI.

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I read lots of stuff with Tiger and Retro 6 problems. I even bought ATTO scsi cards. For the reason of SCSI problems and Apple dropping SCSI support I bought VXA-2 (firewire) and I am testing it now. I have better luck with Retro 5.1.177 and OS X Panther (10.3.9) so far. I can backup local drive to tape with about 285mb/min (read/write) using Tiger and Retro 6.0.212 but I can only get 150 mb/min when I try to backup mounted AFP volume. My network speed is 39mb/sec. But when I use Panther and Retro 5.1.177 I get again 285mb/min (Read/write). There is a problem somewhere. I want to use Tiger and for now I am stuck with Panther because of a SLOW backjup speed. I tried this with G5 (gigabit), powerbook (gigabit), Mini (100bt) and eMac (100bt).

 

If you can switch to firewire maybe you should try it? I'll let you know what other problems I have. Since I was using retro 5 with OS 9 till now I had not many problems yet. I will leave my DDS-4 tapes running on OS 9 Mac with Retro 5 (beige G3) and buy some new Macs when I switch to Tiger and Retro 6. I wanted to buy few Minis but I had some network speed issues with Minis so far.

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To derekryan: you should consider a job at Dantz for beta testing Retrospect :-) The way you already tested and benchmarked everything... I don't have time for this, Retrospect should work like they advertise but it doesn't. I think it's time to look to other backup software. Anyone ideas?

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