Can not add member to media set

[Sluggo042]

OK, so where are you seeing this business about altering an retro.ini file? Because I've just read through the Read Me file (dated June 26, 2009 entitled "EMC Retrospect 8.1 Read Me") and there is no such reference there I see. Nor do I see any such reference in the Getting Started document.

 

I'll try and get some more detailed reports to answer your questions later this evening - I may be being snarky about the software (losing a hard drive will set a guy on edge), but I do appreciate your assistance!

[CallMeDave]

I may be being snarky about...

 

Yeah! We're gonna get along just fine!!!

 

where are you seeing this business about altering an retro.ini file?

In the link I provide directly above, Post#126837

 

[color:blue]KB Article # 9720: TITLE: Retrospect 8.x for Macintosh Optical Support[/color]

 

But here's the interesting thing. If you _did not_ edit the Device Support entry of the Retrospect.ini file inside the Retrospect.app application package, then the Retrospect Engine should not be loading any optical driver and should not be capturing your disk burner in any way.

 

I'd be interested in hearing a comparison between your steps and the ones I provide in Post#126833. In the meantime, tomorrow I'll re-edit the .ini file to re-disable device support and see if I can see any misbehavior.

 

 

Dave

[Sluggo042]

Alrighty, it is now time to enjoy a moment of schadenfreude while your humble correspondent reveals that he's been doing something fairly stupid, a previously undetected fact that has some bearing on the difference in results we are seeing. Stand by for some good crow here, yum!

 

I've been ignoring, for the most part, the Storage Devices tab, primarily because there is nothing there that needs be set up prior to launching a backup attempt. In fact, I'd just finished writing up an elaborate description of the steps I'd been taking up to this point, and a comparison to the steps CallMeDave described in attempting to duplicate the findings. But in considering Dave's steps, I took a closer look at what Retrospect was reporting via the Storage Devices tab.

 

Yup, Retrospect sees the drive, it's got a green light and everything, no problem. Look, it even tells me the make and model . . . a Matshita CD-RW . . .

 

CD-RW??? Oh my.

 

(That glow you're seeing off in California isn't another brush fire, it is my face turning beet red.)

 

D'OH! Of course, this thing can't actually _write_ to a DVD, can it? I'm so used to my standard machine's abilities, it hadn't occurred to me that the backup laptop I'm using at the moment couldn't write to the media I was feeding it. I knew it could _play_ DVDs, so I just presumed the ability to write to 'em too.

 

So, that probably explains the drive hangs. I was putting DVDs into the machine, and it was trying to figure out just what the heck I'd fed to it. All the other symptoms, Disk Utility hanging and such, are being caused by this, not by the lack of support for optical drives in Retrospect. (Though, if I might attempt to claim some tiny shred of dignity in light of this dufus mistake, it still would have been nice if the program had warned me beforehand that Optical backup was disabled, rather than allowing me to ram my head against the feature.)

 

I apologize to Dave for leading him on this wild goose chase. I still hold that some of my comments were fair - that a released piece of software doesn't have a bloody Users Guide after all this time, and that a key feature (optical drive support) has been intentionally disabled still seems to me pretty unseemly. However, my other comments I withdraw, as I've not really given the program a fair test so far. Perhaps I'll be able to do so once I get my main machine back online.

 

Until then, please excuse me, I've got me some crow to eat. Mmmm, that's good bird!