jgro Posted October 22, 2008 Report Share Posted October 22, 2008 I'm restoring a disk from a disk backup on Mac OS 10.5.4 using Retrospect 6.1.230. I don't know why the copying was so slow as it was presumably reading contiguous data from a FireWire drive and writing to a blank SAS drive yet write speeds got down to as low as 5MB/sec (peak sustained was 80MB/sec). Anyway, after all the files were finally copied, it then went to "Completing Restore..." and was doing fewer than 100 files per minute! The backup was 1.4 million files (that's Mac OS X for you), so I dared not wait for it to finish. What's going on? This kind of restore is the main reason I use Retrospect instead of Time Machine, but if it's not going to work, then what's the point? Is there a workaround? I want to get my disk restored. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted October 22, 2008 Report Share Posted October 22, 2008 "Completing restore" is when Retrospect sets the permissions for each and every file. If you restored a full system, you are advised to let it finish. If you restored just user documents, you can stop Retrospect and then set the correct permissions from Finder (or Terminal). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jgro Posted October 22, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 22, 2008 I'm doing a full system restore. However, at the rate the "completing restore" is going it, it could literally take weeks to finish, and this is for a relatively small drive (115 GB of data). Whether or not this is technically a bug, it makes using Retrospect impractical to use unless there's some kind of work around I'm missing. Doing a restore from Time Machine doesn't take this kind of time, and that's using a Time Capsule (low-performance Ethernet connected drive) vs. using a high-performance FireWire 800 drive. So is this a bug that will be fixed? A feature that will be added? What do I do in the mean time? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmedley Posted December 1, 2008 Report Share Posted December 1, 2008 Did you ever finish restoring? I am trying to restore entire disk on an iMac 10.5.5 using the latest version of retrospect (230). Says remaining is zero, but its been saying that for a few hours now. I am going to go ahead and let it run over night to see if it will actually finish. Seems to show the same files over and over. One thing I know is that it doesn't work if you stop it (tried a couple of times already). Jim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidduff Posted December 5, 2008 Report Share Posted December 5, 2008 i'm seeing this too. typical users do a lot more backup up than they do restoring, and thus may not be aware of this issue, but it is a very significant issue! i am now attempting a restore of failed hard drive from a "normal" mac laptop (~100GB mix of apps, documents). it has been running now for the last 7 hours and i have no idea when it's going to complete. the first part (restoring files) had a useful progress indicator and was complete in about 90 minutes. now it is sitting in the "completing restore..." phase and i have no idea whether it will be done in 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, ... it appears to be taking on the order of half a second for each file (very rough estimate based on how fast the filenames are flipping by). there are a bit over 1M files total, so that would mean roughly 500k seconds, which is 5+ days!!!! ouch. let's hope i'm wrong about that. what in the world could possibly make it take so long!?!? i definitely agree with the user about who said this makes using retrospect "impractical"... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmedley Posted December 5, 2008 Report Share Posted December 5, 2008 David: I let mine go over night and it was completed the next morning. I'm not sure what the total time was, but I would say something over 12 hrs. I started about 9 am and left work at 4:30 with it still going. Yes, this is definitely something that Dantz needs to look into. Good luck, Jim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidduff Posted December 5, 2008 Report Share Posted December 5, 2008 ditto. i also let mine run over night (i really had no choice). the logs indicate it took about 11 hours to finish. if all retrospect is doing at the end is fixing permissions on all the files that were restored, then it seems to me that it should be very simple to have a progress indicator that shows this. as an aside... while i was waiting for the restore to complete, i had nothing better to do, so i was browsing through the forums and came across this gem written over 5 years ago (!): http://forums.dantz.com//showtopic.php?tid/7279/post/26843/hl//fromsearch/1/#26843 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davebittailor.com Posted May 12, 2009 Report Share Posted May 12, 2009 I'll add my voice to this thread. I'm trying to restore my client's server disk that failed and it's been restoring now for 23 hours with no indication about how much remains or how long it might take. The initial progress bar indicated that it would take about 3-4 hours which seemed perfectly reasonable for about 250 GBs worth of data, but 23+ hours is just plain ridiculous. I know that EMC isn't putting any effort into fixing Retrospect 6 at this point, and it's sad because there's no way I'm ever going to trust an EMC Mac product again after this (and other) experiences with Retrospect. I just can't wait until my client's new Intel Xserve gets here so we can switch to CrashPlan and say goodbye to Retrospect for good.off> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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