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Scheduled jobs failed but no alerts were generated!


haggis999

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I am running Retrospect Professional 9.5 under 64-bit Windows 7 and have just become aware that none of my scheduled backup jobs have been running for the past 3 weeks! It was very careless of me to miss this problem for so long, especially as I have email alerts set up to notify me when each backup has completed. My only excuse is that I have been extremely busy and the absence of the Retrospect confirmation emails among other similar emails I get from my Synology NAS boxes just didn't catch my attention. At the age of 71 you also get a bit forgetful...    

 

Another reason for my failure to notice this problem is that I thought I would receive automatic alerts from Retrospect if there was any problem that prevented my scheduled backup jobs from running. No such alerts were ever received. A minute or so after I manually started Retrospect this morning, all of these long-delayed jobs automatically started to run one after the other. I did nothing to prompt this.

 

I had previously selected the 'Notify for failures and media' checkbox under Preferences => Notification => Alerts. Can anyone offer a possible explanation for why that has not worked in this case?

 

David

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Retrospect can only send email if/when it is running. It can't send when not running.

 

What does your preferences look like? Here is mine:

post-8868-0-82901200-1426247757_thumb.png

 

As you discovered, if a script hasn't run, Retrospect runs it as soon as it can. In your case as soon as Retrospect was launched.

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Hi Lennart,
My startup preferences are the same as yours, with the one exception that I have chosen to exit after the completion of each job. That does not look like an important difference.

 

I have received several problem alerts in the past when there was an issue with the availability of the NAS box that is the target of my backups. This is the first time I have become aware of a problem that did not generate an alert.

 

David 

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It sounds like your Retrospect either crashed, or would not start for some reason.

If you let Retro Exit when it has finished its work, then it is the RetroLauncher Service, which should be running permanently, that re-launches it when the next job is ready.

Make sure the that the Launcher service is running by checking in your Services Control Panel

If Retrospect crashes it makes an entry in the Assert.utx log which can be found in the (hidden) C:\Program Data\Retrospect folder on Win 7.

You can open this file with Retrospect or Notepad

Whilst the full content of the assert message only makes sense to a programmer, the header for each one can give some clues.

And you can see whether it is an isolated incident or has been happening on a regular basis.

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Hi JoTRaGo,
You have correctly identified the source of my problem! Your post immediately reminded me that I had recently disabled a bunch of services via msconfig.exe as part of an attempt to diagnose some other problem. This happened at around the time my backups began to fail. A quick check showed that the Retrospect launcher is still disabled.

 

Many thanks for your help. Senior moments like this happen when you get older  :)

 

David    

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