Retrospect crashes to desktop when backing up a specific mailbox

[MaxNJI]

Yesterday we purchased the multiserver upgrade of Retrospect 7.7 plus the Exchange addon.

 

I started testing mailboxes backups, but I came across a serious problem. Whenever the the backup reaches a particular user's mailbox, Retrospect just just crashes to the desktop.

 

I tried this few times and I even tried to backup this single mailbox instead of all of them, but it always crashes.

 

The problem is that nothing gets logged even if I set the loglevel to 6. The only thing that shows up in the events tab is this:

 

"Execution terminated unexpectedly, possibly due to a power failure or system crash"

 

For the record, I'm running Exchange 2007 SP2 with all the latest hotfixes on a Windows 2003 Enterprise X64. Retrospect 7.7.325 - 7.7.3.102 is installed on the same server. The mailbox in question is about 1.6GB.

 

Please help.

 

Max

Edited June 2, 2010 by Guest

[rodrigocm5.com.br]

Hi Max,

 

Ive had a similar problem. Ive found out that on the specific mailbox, there was a corrupted message/folder that caused Retrospect to crash.

 

Im no expert in Exchange, but in my case, Retrospect reported the folder where there was the corrupted message. You may not see the error message because Retrospect is crashing before writing to the logs.

 

You may try to run chkdisk and or to move the mailbox within Exchange.

 

One thought: I could not see the error using the gui. I had to open the .utx log file in order to find out the error.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Rodrigo.

[MaxNJI]

Thanks for the reply RodrigoM. I already checked the operations_lot.utx, but I didn't fin anything useful.

 

This is repeated over and over for at least half of the log file:

 

	Hotkey (P) for: "&Pause..."  conflicts with: "&Pause..."

 

then this:

MemAlloc: caller requested 153 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 236 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 236 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 155 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 155 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 155 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 155 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 160 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 160 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 156 bytes
MemAlloc: caller requested 156 bytes

 

Is the backup log saved only at the end or is there like a temp file where the progress is saved?

 

Is there a limit to the size of a mailbog that can be backed up? This one is 1.5GB.

 

If this is caused by a corrupted message or folder, is there some tool I can use to identify it since Retrospect doesn't provide any useful information.

Edited June 4, 2010 by Guest

[MaxNJI]

After many hours of testing I was finally able to find what was causing the issue.

 

It was the contacts folder in that mailbox, more specifically 1 contact entry. I exported it to vcf file, deleted it from the contact folder and the backup completed.

 

I then tried to reimport the contact from the vcf file and tested another backup and it still worked.

[MaxNJI]

It happened again! :angryred:

 

Retrospect crashed again on another mailbox and again it is related to the Contacts.

 

This is so frustrating. I am seriously considering asking for a refund.

[Daniels]

You might want to go through everybody's contacts and see if there are any unnecessary contacts. Sometimes spammers like to add to the contacts without people knowing. Also if it is the same contact as the previous mailbox you might want to see who else has that contact.

Edited June 7, 2010 by Guest

[MaxNJI]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately it was not the same contact. I was able to identify the "offending" contact by elimination process which took almost 2 hours.

 

Before I delete the contact I export it to vcf file, after I verify that the backup job doesn't crash, I re-import the same contact from the vcf file without making any modification and everything still works.

 

I don't understand how a single contact, for whatever reason, can crash Retrospect like that and then deleting and reimporting the same exact contact fixes the problem.

 

I'm just at mailboxes starting with the letter E and found two instances of this problem. I hope there won't be anymore, but I'm not that optimistic.

 

I wish somebody from support would comment on this issue since this looks to me like a major bug of some sort.

[rhwalker]

I wish somebody from support would comment on this issue since this looks to me like a major bug of some sort.

It appears that you have a misunderstanding of these forums. These forums are user-to-user support, and are not the way to contact Retrospect support.

 

Here is a link to the Retrospect Forum Rules:

Retrospect Forum Rules

 

The relevant portion is:

 

This forum is a community based self help tool for users of the Retrospect Backup Software and other EMC Insignia Products. ...

 

While this forum is monitored by members of the EMC Technical Support team, it is not possible to reply to all questions and threads. This forum is not an official method for contacting technical support. EMC employees are under no obligation to reply to individual forum posts. If you need immediate technical support, you can contact technical support directly at http://www.emcinsignia.com/contactsupport

I suggest that you contact Retrospect support and submit a bug report that includes a copy of the problem mailbox (before you removed the problem data). If you can't provide a copy of that to Retrospect support, there really doesn't seem any way that the programmers will be able to track down and eliminate this apparent bug.

 

We are just Retrospect users like you are, without access to the code. There's no way that any of us other forum users will be able to address this bug. You seem to have found a workaround, which is what you will have to keep using until you submit the problem data to the Retrospect support group and the programmers are able to figure out what the problem is.

 

You may not be aware that the Retrospect group was recently sold to Roxio (Sonic Solutions) a few weeks ago, and support is in transition from EMC to Roxio. Here's a link to a recent post in these forums with interim contact information for a direct line to the support group during the transition: Contact information for Retrospect support during transition to Roxio

 

I hope this clears up your misunderstanding about these forums and points you in the right direction so that this can be fixed.

 

Russ

Edited June 8, 2010 by Guest
Contact information for Retrospect support during transition to Roxio