DIsk space?

[encg]

Anyone have any clues on why attempting to back up 7.5 GB to a drive that has 18.6 GB free results in the following message:

 

"Not enough disk space for selected files (short by about 484.2 M)."

 

 

 

Backup drive is a brand-new Buslink 20 GB Disk-on-the-Go USB 2.0

 

PC is running Windows ME w/ all updates and fixes.

 

Retrospect Express 5.6.127 w/ 2.6 update.

 

 

 

What am I missing here?

[IrenaS]

How is the drive that you've saved the backup set to formatted? File backup sets can be limited in size by the format of the drive they are saved to:

 

 

 

FAT: 2 GB

 

FAT 32: 4 GB

 

NTFS: 1 TB

 

 

 

With compression, it's possible that your backup set was approaching the 4 GB limit.

 

 

 

If not, how large has the file backup set grown? Is there other data on that drive?

 

 

 

Best Regards,

 

 

 

Irena Solomon

 

Dantz Tech Support

[encg]

Since it is a Windows ME system the drive is, of course, a FAT32 partition. Are you saying that Retrospect only recognizes 4 GB partitions?? There is no practical limitation on partition sizes in FAT32 that I am aware of other than those imposed by the BIOS on older systems.which is not the case here. You may be confusing partition size and file size - I have read that FAT32 has a limit of 4 GB on a SINGLE FILE. If this is the case and Retrospect is limited to a 4GB backup set then I'm very disappointed in the product - I would not have purchased the drive at all on this basis.

 

 

 

Also, in answer to your question about other files on the drive, no, of course not. That is why I specified that the drive is brand new and that Windows is reporting 18.6 GB of free space.

 

 

 

DOS fdisk shows 19061 Mbytes free at the moment.

[encg]

Further to my last message - I've experimented with a smaller backup and that works so it appears that the limitation is the 4 GB file size.

 

I don't see this limitation mentioned in the manual in a quick look nor does it come up in the process of setting up an immediate backup - the program quite happily lets you select the entire drive making you think that it is ok to backup in one shot. This seems pretty lame when the program is being sold bundled with drives of up to 60 GB capacity and with advertising claims about how easy it is to make a disaster recovery set with a bootable cd. Sorry, I don't see that this program makes it easy at all and if I had paid for the program separately I would be returning it for a refund. By the way, the index for the manual has nothing for "drive", "fat", "file size", "limit", "limitation, "partition", or anything else that I could think of to locate any reference to this limitation in the software.

 

As it is I have un-installed Retrospect and will probably go back to Drive Image Pro for my purposes. Thanks anyway.

[encg]

Correction: I meant "Drive2Drive" in my last post, not Drive Image Pro. Drive2Drive is a great program lacking only a means of making a boot disk for a dos disaster recovery.

 

Still wondering why the 4 GB backup set limitation does not seem to be covered in the documentation?

[IrenaS]

I'm sorry that you've been so frustrated with Retrospect. Hard drive backup for very large volumes will be improved a future release of Retrospect, and the limits of the partition format will be addressed. It would probably be possible for Retrospect to check the format of the drive and issue a warning, but we'd prefer to just take a different approach to file backup sets that aren't constrained by the limit in the first place.

 

 

 

Your User's Guide probably doesn't list this limit, but it certainly will be added. In the mean time, we have documented it in the Knowledgebase and in documents that discuss hard drive backup.

 

 

 

Best Regards,

 

 

 

Irena Solomon

 

Dantz Tech Support

[encg]

Sorry but that's a pretty lame response for a product that is being sold bundled with large capacity drives! If someone buys a large drive where bundled backup software is a selling point then you can bet they are anticipating being able to back up their entire hard drive in one operation. Instead, they get a product that won't do what they expect and doesn't even explain the circumstances of the error. Let alone suggesting any "work-arounds" for the limitation. Ridiculous! FAT32 has been around for, what, 3-4 years already and your documentation is only NOW going to address this issue? Even worse, when a customer inquires about the problem your response is that the 4 GB backup set limit MIGHT be the problem? Surely I wasn't the first customer to run into this!

[encg]

A week later I still don't see any suggestions on how to back up an entire "large" drive using this product....

[IrenaS]

1. Reformat the drive as NTFS.

 

 

 

2. Break up your backup between several File Backup sets that can remain within the FAT32 limit of 4 GB.

 

 

 

3. Use the Duplicate feature in Retrospect, which is not constrained by these limits.

 

 

 

4. Wait for an update to Retrospect that fixes this. As I said, this is certainly being addressed by our development team.

 

 

 

Irena Solomon

 

Dantz Tech Support

[ewb]

I have the very same situation as "encg" and I am equally disappointed with the response from Dantz. I chose Retrospect Express to backup my laptop's internal 10GB hard disk to my external 80GB hard disk (USB 2.0), which seems like a reasonable capability to expect from this product. I was attracted by the advertised claims of simplicity, flexibility, and automation, especially the IncrementalPLUS feature. Unfortunately, Retrospect Express is unable to handle this basic task in a Windows 98 or Windows Me environment.

 

 

 

I was already aware of the 4GB FAT32 file size limit (Chapter 2, Page 40), but I expected Retrospect to handle a File backup set as it does a Tape or CD backup set. When the limit is reached, it should simply add another member to the backup set by opening a new file on the destination drive. Instead, Retrospect terminates the backup with a cryptic error message, "Trouble writing media: error -102 (trouble communicating)", which does not indicate the actual problem. This is very upsetting after patiently waiting two hours for the backup to complete. Retrospect can estimate the size of the File backup set, so it should at least issue a warning in this situation before starting the operation.

 

 

 

Irena Solomon's suggestions are unsatisfactory for the following reasons.

 

 

 

1. Windows 98 and Windows Me do not support NTFS.

 

 

 

2. I tried breaking my backup into several File backup sets, which involves a Preview scan and the tedious process of marking/unmarking folders in the browser window to reduce the size of each File backup set. This allows me to complete a full hard disk backup distributed across three File backup sets, but when I attempt a subsequent incremental backup, there is no way to instruct Retrospect to use all three File backup set catalogs to decide which files have changed. The IncrementalPLUS feature becomes essentially disabled, making this an unusable suggestion. Furthermore, Retrospect Express does not remember which folders I marked during the previous Preview scan, so I must repeat the entire process to perform another full backup.

 

 

 

3. I understand the Duplicate feature is not constrained by file size limits, but this function is practically the same as a simple XCOPY command, without utilizing any of Retrospect's other features. I certainly do not need to buy Retrospect if this is all it will do for me.

 

 

 

4. Wait for an update to Retrospect that fixes this? How long? Exactly what is being developed? How will it address this issue?

 

 

[jerry]

I'd say that the trouble you're both seeing is from hard drive sizes growing outside what used to be a reasonable limit. Used to be, no one would think of buying a big hard drive to back up their hard drive. It wasn't economical and it wasn't practical - it was expensive and you couldn't take the drive off-site. So things like tape and removable media were the best ways to back up. With file systems shrugging off their lower-limit file sizes (less than 2-4GB) and portable/cheap hard drives becoming commonplace, this has leapfrogged the product. Unfortunately, to new users, it's problematic, but I'm sure they're going to get this functionality out, as it is probably a very common request. "Soon" would be hard to discern - software doesn't write itself and there would be release schedules, and they certainly have their hands full with their Mac OS X product. But it's also worth noting the "best practices" for backup, as noted before - offsite backup, etc. If you're just looking for another copy of data to be sitting around in case of hard drive failure, a RAID might be a better idea. If you're looking to have a disaster recovery plan, then you should be taking the drive off-site.

 

 

 

And I'm not familiar with XCOPY. Does it do a byte-by-byte comparison of data copied? I'm not trying to be smart, I don't know. That's a feature of Retrospect that could be useful if you're just duplicating data. And if the drive is large enough, you could duplicate on different days to different folders, creating a large but workable incremental.

 

 

 

Just a couple of suggestions....

[Ned]

Wow, I'm glad to find this thread. I kept getting Trouble writing: (4294912512), error -102 (trouble communicating) when I tried to do a backup of my entire hard drive © from my Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop running Windows ME to a 80 Gig HD I bought just for the purpose of backing up to.

 

I have about 5.4 Gig to backup and the backup file is running just over 4 Gig. Now I understand why, but I'm not thrilled. I'm one of the newbies who thought I could use Retrospect to take care of me for disaster recovery. In fact I just replaced my original 6 Gig drive (which had about 5 gig of files on it) with a 30 Gig internal drive. Retrospect flawlessly restored to my newly installed 30G internal drive and I was happy.

 

Then I added more files to my internal drive and now I can no longer backup without the -102 error.

 

 

 

So, can a Dantz tech or someone tell me - Can I use duplicate (to a folder on my 80G external drive) to duplicate my entire file system (from my 30G internal drive C) and then use that duplicated file tree for disaster recovery if I need to?

 

 

[Mayoff]

Hi,

 

 

 

You can use the duplicate feature, but Retrospect Express can not duplicate the Registry. You would need the Desktop edition or later.

 

 

 

If you consider an upgrade to Windows XP, then you can format the disk as NTFS and the problem will go away (just a thought) because it supports files over 4 gig.

 

'

[Ned]

Thank you, Mayoff.

 

 

 

I'm staying with WinME right now because I support my fiancee whose computer is on WinME, because her real estate company is, etc. etc.

 

 

 

So, how about this: I do a backup of My Documents (about a Gig plus of files), then I do a backup of Program Files (about a 1.5 Gig), then I do a backup of entire disk (minus MyDocs & Program Files - there must be some way to exclude some folders from a backup, though I haven't been able to find it with 10 minutes of looking through the help files).

 

 

 

If this works, I have a disaster recovery solution for the time being. What do you think?

[Ned]

Mayoff, Now that I read your post again...

 

 

 

Are you saying that if I upgrade from Retrospect Express to Retrospect Desktop that the 4Gig file size limitation won't be a problem?

 

 

 

Hell, that's only $150 bucks (maybe less if I can get an upgrade deal) and I've already spent far more than that with my time trying to debug this problem. (a low level disk check of an 80Gig drive takes hours on its own). If that will fix my problem, Yay! I'll upgrade and get on with my life.

 

 

 

Why doesn't Dantz documentation or a read me address this problem? It could have saved me hours of time trying to debug the misleading 102 error.

[Mayoff]

Upgrading Retrospect will not solve the 4 gig limit issue.

 

 

 

Upgrading will allow you to use the "duplicate" feature AND copy the registry during that duplicate operation.

 

--------------

 

If you want to split the backup into smaller chunks, so no chunk is larger then 4 gigs, then that will work fine. It will make restoring a little more complicated....

[rpalmeri]

And here we are, months after this issue was brought up, and still no update to overcome the file-limit problem. Apparently writing code to have Retrospect automatically split the backup into appropriate-sized files is either not too high a priority, or is a lot tougher than this non-coder appreciates.

 

With today's larger drives, this is a problem that should be addressed!!

 

 

 

 

[lv2ski]

Dantz is addressing an improvement for Hard Drive backup of very large volumes in the future release of Retrospect for Windows.

 

 

 

 

[pabrown522]

What is the update on a fix for being able to backup a hard drive that is more than 4gbs which is the file size limit that Retrospect recognizes. I want to backup my whole C hard drive to a usb 2.0 external drive, for disaster reasons as others want to do. My C drive has about 10gbs used space. Until the update of Retropect is available that will lift the file limitation for large volume files, can someone list a strategy of how and can backup my hard drive in sections. And how would I restore my whole system using these splitup backups?

[lv2ski]

Dantz is addressing an improvement for Hard Drive backup of very large volumes in the future release of Retrospect for Windows. I cannot give you an ETA. I am sorry.

 

 

 

To do a restore from split backupsets you would restore the main system backupset which would restore your registry and allow the computer to boot. Then you would restore the 2nd backupset which should conatin all of your other files/programs.

[Tausq]

Sorry to sound like a broken record but I agree with "ewb" and "encg". How can you make a product in this day of umpteen-gig hard drives that only backs up 4 gig at a time? A question to "ewb" and "encg", do you know of any other products that can back-up 30 gig of data at one time (like I thought this product would)?

[lv2ski]

We can backup the data all at one time using the duplicate function in Retrospect.

 

 

[ewb]

Dantz Development Corporation has really missed the boat in this area. Large external hard disks with fast USB 2.0 or FireWire interfaces are very common now, but Retrospect Express and Restropect Desktop are unable to satisfy this immediate market need. Meanwhile, I am stuck with their software product that does not provide the seamless, effortless capabilities that I expected. The features are there, but this limitation makes them useless. I followed their suggestion to use the Duplicate function, but that is a weak solution, because it does not provide incremental backups and selective restoration. I didn't need to purchase a $150 product that in my situation is nothing more than a glorified XCOPY program.

 

 

 

Wake up, Dantz product managers! I considered you to be the leader in full-featured disk backup software. Why did you not foresee this business opportunity long ago? Please be more specific about how you plan to meet this requirement, and when we can expect a solution. If you feel that Windows 98 and Windows Me are not your target market, kindly tell us rather than stringing us along, so we can search elsewhere. Thank you.