Express 5.6 hangs on quit after restoring single file

[mckenn]

I am running Retrospect Express 5.6 under Windows XP, backing up my files to an external USB hard drive. The backups have executed fine. Yesterday for the first time I actually USED my backups, to restore a file that had been accidentally overwritten.

 

I restored the file successfully, then quit Retrospect by clicking on the "X" button in the upper right corner of the window. The status bar at the bottom showed "Quitting..." and the activity LED on the USB drive flickered continuously for a VERY long time. Finally I looked at the disk properties of the USB drive and it showed that the drive was nearly full! Before I did the restore, the drive had maybe 90GB of data (out of a total 120GB), so whatever was happening had eaten up 30GB.

 

I waited a little longer, hoping the disk being full would cause the task to fail on its own and tell me what it had been doing, but it just kept going. It really started to smell like some kind of infinite loop or race condition. Finally I tried to end the process, I clicked on the X again and got the usual "Are you sure?" dialog and said OK. But the process didn't stop! I also tried to end the task through the XP Task Manager, same result (i.e. no luck). It just kept going, like the Energizer Bunny.

 

At this point I was desperate enough to unplug the USB cable. FINALLY I got an error dialog that said: "Windows was unable to save all the data for the file F:\System Volume Information\_restore\{bunch of hex digits and dashes}\RP978\change.log. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connectio" [sic]

 

BTW the disk activity LED on the USB drive continued to flicker even after I unplugged the cable and the Retrospect task ended. It finally went out after I plugged the USB cable back in.

 

I'm running a check disk now, which is either hung up in Phase 4 or it's just taking a reallllly long time to complete. I'll let it go for a while longer.

 

But I can't imagine what on earth Retrospect (or XP?) was doing to eat up all that disk space, why would it create a change log of any kind when nothing had changed? Remember this was a restore operation, not a backup. My first thought was that System Restore had somehow been turned back on for the drive, but I checked and no it was turned off as desired.

 

And what have I done to my drive??

 

Any ideas??

mckenn

[natew]

Hi

 

Right click on my computer and go to properties->system restore. Turn off system restore for the USB drive.

 

Thanks

Nate

[mckenn]

I already checked System Restore, it is (and was) already off for that drive.

 

However now that I know what the "System Volume Information\_restore" folder is for (i.e. System Restore), I suspect that some vestige of System Restore was functioning even though I had turned it off. At least, that's the only explanation I can think of.

 

I know that when I started up Retrospect for the first time after I installed the drive a couple of weeks ago, System Restore *was* on. I realized it and quit Retrospect and turned SR off for the drive. However that may have somehow gotten the system confused, who knows.

 

I still think it's weird that I never had this problem (System Restore eating up large amounts of disk space) when I ran backups, only with this one restore of a single tiny text file.

 

My solution after doing careful research was to delete the System Volume Information folder on the USB drive. The system replaced it automatically a little while later, but as long as it stays empty I'm not going to worry about it.

 

Just think, if I had not made my system files/folders visible I wouldn't have even known that directory existed - and the 25+ GB of space that it was eating up would have been permanently missing! I'm thinking of turning off System Restore on all drives, just to reduce my own confusion in the future.

 

Anyway, thanks for the advice!

mckenn