RonT Posted October 28, 2005 Report Share Posted October 28, 2005 Sorry for the long post: I've been using Retro 7 for several weeks, and I loved it at first, but it seems to be trashing my hard drives. I've tried backing up to two different external drives. One is a 400 GB Seagate on USB2.0, the other a 160 GB Maxtor on firewire. Both began showing exactly the same symptoms after I'd used them a while. If I delete anything on them or format them, I can do a fresh file backup. The resulting "Backup Set B.rbf" is about 58 GB. At first I could take new snapshots every day for weeks with no problem. Then I started occasionally having problems, and now it happens all the time. When I kick off the backup (immediate), the program will start to initialize, the activity light on the drive will come on, and I can hear normal drive noises. Then, after about ten seconds, before Retro starts scanning files, the drive sounds will become repetitive, the light will be on steady, and nothing else happens. The computer is not hung, but the drive seems to be lost in space. I've left it like this for up to several hours. I can stop the backup, but the drive keeps cranking away. I can close the activity monitor okay. If I exit Retrospect, it tells me I'm still running a backup, and when I choose to continue the exit, Retrospect hangs and can only be closed with the task manager. The drive is still cranking. If I shut down Windows (I'm using XP Pro, SP2), it goes nearly to completion, then hangs until I hit the switch. THEN the drive quits cranking. When I power back up, I have a dialog on the screen saying that Retrospect failed, possibly due to an unexpected shut-down. When I examine the drive, I see a file named "Backup Set B.rbf.rfc, about 50 MB. As far as I can tell, the drive seems to work for all other purposes, but I can no longer do backups until I delete the old one. In view of the fact that the exact same symptoms occur on two different brand drives and on different interfaces, I would assume the problems is either central to WinXP or a bug of some kind in Retrospect. Or perhaps an incompatibility with something else on the machine, but why did it work for a while and then go progressively bad? Any ideas? Ron Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted October 28, 2005 Report Share Posted October 28, 2005 Hi Turn off Windows system restore on the external drives. Do the problems continue after that? Thanks nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RonT Posted October 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted October 28, 2005 Nate, I'll want to run it a few more times to be sure, but it looks like that may have done the trick. I just did what I haven't been able to do for a week or so. Thanks!!! Ron Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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