Retrospect 5 Replacing Tape Deck with External Drives?

[acmeinteractive 0]

We have retropect 5 running on Mac OSX Server 10.1.4. I always seem to get "Bad Backup set headers" errors. The few times I've tried to recover files, I've never been able to get all of them without a lot of them giving me that error. Right know we backup to AIT-2 tapes and I have a feeling that its the ancient tape deck thats causing issues. I want to replace this with external hard drives, because I feel like these would be more reliable (and because the tape deck seems to freeze every other week or so).

 

- Will retrospect 5 support external hard drives as backup media?

- Will using external drives instead fix the problems with the corrupt files?

 

Thanks!

[Mayoff 124]

That is a really OS version and a really old version of Retrospect. It can backup to file backup sets saved to hard disk.

[rhwalker 2]

- Will retrospect 5 support external hard drives as backup media?

Not if you use unreliable hardware.

 

- Will using external drives instead fix the problems with the corrupt files?

Not if you have unreliable hardware.

 

There's not enough information in your post to know what your hardware issue is. You could have memory problems with your computer that are causing your problems. You could have HBA issues, SCSI issues, who knows. Your computer's motherboard could be bad. You could have power conditioning problems.

 

If you value your data, you might consider using a reasonably-modern computer, a reasonably-recent OS version, and an up-to-date version of Retrospect.

 

Russ

[acmeinteractive 0]

You guys are preaching to the choir. But the president of the company is extremely cheap. I would love to at the very least, get a mac mini with leapard or snow leopard server. But that would at least cost $1100 and then retrospect is another couple hundred. And a lot of machines in the office have different version OSes so I don't know if that would cause conflicts.

 

Are there any details I can provide that would help besides the fact that everything is ancient?

[rhwalker 2]

You guys are preaching to the choir. But the president of the company is extremely cheap. I would love to at the very least, get a mac mini with leapard or snow leopard server. But that would at least cost $1100 and then retrospect is another couple hundred. And a lot of machines in the office have different version OSes so I don't know if that would cause conflicts.

Your president just has to decide how much the company's data is worth. Apparently, not very much. You may be in the choir, but it's part of your job to make the point. It's simply a risk/benefit tradeoff. Make sure the president understands that when (not if) all of the backup data disappears and becomes irretrievable, it's not your fault but his.

 

As for determining whether there would be conflicts if things were upgraded, that's why you set up a testbed and shake things out before deploying a critical resource such as a server and/or backup server. Don't test things like that out in a production environment.

 

Are there any details I can provide that would help besides the fact that everything is ancient?

Your troubleshooting steps to date might be useful, as might your hardware setup. If your problems are, for example, a bad SCSI cable or SCSI terminator to the tape drive, putting in a disk drive on that same SCSI chain won't make things any more reliable.

 

A very useful bit of information would be to try another AIT-2 tape drive. That would be very useful information to have.

 

Russ

[acmeinteractive 0]

Actually I'm not an IT person. I've just had to take over the duties because I'm the only one that knows anything technical about computers.

 

There hasn't been a whole lot of troubleshooting, because there's not much I can do. It's been a lot of google searching to find the cause of such errors. Obviously when the tape deck freezes, I'll restart the deck and the server to get it working again. I don't have another tape deck to try out.

 

I'm using sony AIT-2 50gb native 130gb compressed SDX2-50C tapes. The tape drive is Model SDX-D500C from Sony. Retrospect version 5.0.205. Mac OSX Server 10.1.4 256mb memory, PPC G4, 74.52gb capacity hd with 10.69gb free.

 

Obviously this system is outdated. It was probably set up like 10 years ago. This isn't some big corporation with a whole IT department. It's like 6 people that don't know anything about computers and me.

 

I still think it would be worth trying external drives because if its any component of the tape deck that's the problem, this could solve it and if not, you can always use external drives for storage.

[rhwalker 2]

Whatever. Good luck with your data.

 

You could try updating the firmware in the tape drive:

Sony SDX-D500C Firmware

 

Russ