Bullet proof please!

[bnj]

Multiserver 7.6.123, Hot Fix 7.6.2.101

Ca 120 clients are backed up every day in a staged manner with ca 20 disk backup sets that are transferred to tape twice a week. I have one backup set where (huge) clients are written directly to tape.

 

All the backup sets are recycled every ca 3 months in order to clean up and to keep the tape backup set at a reasonable size.

After 3 months we have about 20+ tapes with 300+GB. The tape catalog is then 6-7GB.

 

Retrospect has become much more stable over the years since when we started in 2005. I have no real statistics, but I think the program now crashes 1-2 times per month.

 

I think you should put some work in getting it even more stable, but especially more bulletproof to crashes. Very often when the system crashes, the catalog files are messed up. When an action is done on a retrospect file I suggest that you keep a copy of the old one until the operation is successfully done.

 

I have a backup script for the tape catalogs and other Retrospect files, but they are not always accepted by the program when I restore them.

 

Right now I am close to do a recycle, but the tape catalog was corrupted after a crash. The dialog boxes for recatalog are telling me to do strange things that are not possible. Sort of "select most recent member" where the OK button is then greyed out.

 

I don't want to create a new tape backup set without having a working catalog file for the old one. I am recreating it now, but it could take a week before it is finished reading all the tapes unless I want to set the alarm clock to every 3 hours so I can login and klick OK to go using the next tape (already sitting in the robot).

 

So PLEASE change the way you handle files. Let there be virtually no risk of loosing files if the program dies.

 

This also goes for all the other Retrospect files like Config75.dat, which i managed to restore from the backup. It was still so corrupted though, that it crashed the program everytime Retrospect started backup. I stopped all operations and could print out all the settings on paper. Then I manually had to start all over to connect all clients, put them in backup sets, recreate selectors etc. It took 1-2weeks work before the system was running as before.

 

We have have 2 NAS disks that I planned to use, but Retrospect seems to be very sensitive to disturbance of the network connection. The problem might be on the NAS, but a normal windows connection works fine. It seems that Retrospect cannot recreate the connection during a backup session.

 

You have a good product now with many ingenious features, but please make it more bullet proof.

 

Best regards,

Brian