error -644 "sorry can't save configuration"

[macpro]

Last week I received this nice error message. It had been mentioned for a couple of days in the Retrospect mails but I was a bit late in noticing it.

So I stopped Retrospect and started it again.

What a mistake. Retrospect wouldn't startup at all.

I do make copies (besides backups!) from the Retrospect folder in /Library/Application Support, so I copied that back.

No luck, because the daily copy had been copying corrupt data for a couple of days.

 

Luckily I was able to restore the folder from Time Machine to the state it was just before I received the message.

Retrospect started. But I had lost all logging from the past few days.

 

And I lost members in 4 disk media sets. Which I could only add back by rebuilding the catalog file.

 

 

Fast forward a couple of days and again I have this message.

This time I have used Retrospect to restore a know good backup in advance before I shut it down.

And I've searched this forum to see other experiences.

Seems that I only have to restore the config file, which in my case would mean Config80.dat.

That's right. I'm running Retrospect 11.5.3.

And that config file is 2,38GB in size.

 

Ran Disk Utility to verify the disk and it saw no problems.

Restarted Retrospect and as expected: down.

 

Activity Monitor shows a Retrospect process owned by root for a couple of seconds and then it dissapears.

 

Put the config80.dat file backup that I restored earlier in place of the corrupt config80.dat file.

Started Retrospect and it's up and running again.

 

So I'm happy?

Not at all.

 

Because again I have lost all logging from the past backups. 

Why? Because Retrospect believes it is a good practice to save log info into the config file.

 

That is why it's 2,38GB in my setup.

That is why it gets corrupt because it changes when it shouldn't have to.

 

So thank you very much Retrospect for keeping this "feature" alive and kicking.

You have been aware of this for a long time but still see no need to solve it.