A Power Failure Corrupts Retrospect???

[rxlaw]

Awoke to Retrospect 7.7 claiming my copy isn't licensed. Had to go through customer support to get a working license code (the one from the purchase date failed and the website claimed it was already used).

 

So I got the license taken care of, and guess what? Retrospect's history thinks I haven't backed up since 12/13. Because Retrospect has gone into this brain dead mode, any backups to existing sets (obviously, they have data written since 12/13) will get ignored and Retrospect will try to do a complete backup from scratch. This will exceed my target drive's capacity and will result in me spending the next two days copying backup sets manually to alternative media, and essentially having to endure a 24 hour full backup cycle.

 

This is unacceptable. Shouldn't backup software be the LAST thing that shats itself with something as common as a power failure? This NEVER happened in 3 years with previous versions.

 

Not a happy camper.

[rxlaw]

Just an update. The backup script was that from December, which didn't contain the volume selections I had been backing up till this corruption.

 

Fortunately, adding additional volumes and system state settings to the script did not cause the subsequent backup (after recovery of the license) to ignore existing snapshots in the backup set.

 

(When upgrading from 7.6 to 7.7, 7.7 seemed to ignore already backed up files from 7.6, resulting in three days work to re-create a new backup set while retaining the 7.6 snapshots.)

 

So while the issue is not as serious as my first post on this topic indicates, the question remains: why is 7.7 subject to this corruption when previous versions never exhibited this problem?

[rhwalker]

Don't know about that, but I had to put in special scripted shutdown code on our xServe (Mac) server to cleanly shut down Retrospect during the half-hour UPS uptime after power fail if the power outage lasted more than 15 minutes - our backup window was longer than that - because we saw tapes not being terminated properly with EOT, etc., causing loss of the tape. Discovered this during testing prior to production deployment.

 

I think that all versions of Retrospect have this problem (and always have) unless you take special steps to shut down cleanly.

 

Russ

[sattar]

how did u recover from the corruption? my drive's having the same problem.

 

thanks!

[rxlaw]

Yes, all is well now. But static licensing data should NOT be in a "config.dat" file that is constantly open and written to by Retrospect, especially because lack of the licensing information completely cripples subsequent critical backups.

 

EMC/Iomega: Ever heard of registry entries? Or separate files for scripts and configuration data? :devil:

[rxlaw]

Understood, but the power failure occurred hours away from any active backup processes.

 

My UPS does signal the system for a clean shutdown, and having witnessed the process it's essentially like a user shutting down from the desktop. There is no rational reason that this should corrupt IDLING critical backup software to the point it's inoperable upon restoration of power.