Grooming won't play ball

[meld51]

Hello,

 

I have a backup set on a NAS drive. This has got full, so I deceide to groom out the old stuff following the Retrospect policy.

 

The first time I tried it came up with an error message:

 

"Grooming Backup Set SeagateNas2_01_2015 failed, error -1017 ( insufficient permissions)

You must recreate the Backup Set's Catalog File."

 

I don't know why it would say that, because there is only me who uses Retrospect on this PC.

 

Anyhow, I did what it said and recreated the Catalog File, which worked fine. Then I tried to groom the backup set again.

 

This time it came up with another error message:

 

"Grooming Backup Set SeagateNas2_01_2015 failed, error -1101 ( file/directory not found)

You must recreate the Backup Set's Catalog File.

 

What have I missed out or done incorrectly?

 

This is Windows 10, Retrospect 9.5.3.103

[narretros]

meld51, see recent topic (titled Retrospect Restore - Inaccessible Boot Device) about 9.5.3 not restoring properly to Windows 10. There are changes like the UEFI business which make this impossible.

 

Also, I and others have seen 9.5.3 make egregious errors like recording bad file signatures so that verify always fails for certain files even though they are actually backed up accurately (I tested that).

 

I would be sure to move to the latest Retrospect 10(.5 at moment), even at the cost, as they claim it works now. And just maybe some errors that affect what you are seeing have been repaired also.

 

Best fortune on it,

Clive

[Scillonian]

meld51, see recent topic (titled Retrospect Restore - Inaccessible Boot Device) about 9.5.3 not restoring properly to Windows 10. There are changes like the UEFI business which make this impossible.

 

Inaccessible Boot Device has nothing to do with Grooming not working.

 

Anyhow, I did what it said and recreated the Catalog File, which worked fine. Then I tried to groom the backup set again.

 

This time it came up with another error message:

 

"Grooming Backup Set SeagateNas2_01_2015 failed, error -1101 ( file/directory not found)

You must recreate the Backup Set's Catalog File.

 

Did Retrospect manage to groom anything out of the backup set on the second try before it failed?

 

To groom a backup set stored on a NAS Retrospect goes through a set sequence for each .rbf file of the backup set it needs to modify. A copy of the .rbf file is made to the Windows Temp space on the machine running Retrospect, modified as necessary then written back to the NAS. With the individual .rbf files being up to 600MB this can put a heavy load on the network connections. If there is any network disruption during the groom then it will fail. Retrospect can make heavy demands on network resources and is therefore capable of surfacing any weakness that would otherwise go unnoticed.

 

I also store most of my backup sets on a NAS share. A few years ago I was having problems with with backups and grooms randomly failing. In the end it came down to Retrospect's network activity overloading the network switch and causing it to crash. The common result in the Retrospect log was 'error -1101 ( file/directory not found)' but by the time I was aware of the failure the switch had restarted and everything was working again so the failure made no sense. I only discovered it was the switch because by chance I happened to be looking at it when it failed while Retrospect was grooming.

 

For better compatibility with Windows 10 (and improvements to grooming reliability) an upgrade to Retrospect 10.5 might be worth considering.

[meld51]

Thanks. I did upgrade. But also I started again with fresh backup sets and I also ensure that there is plenty of space left on my NAS. A white paper I read said to leave at least 500MB free! So far so good but I do occasionally have network issues with the NAS. When this happens I can see the NAS via its web interface but Windows 10 reports that the drive is unavailable even though it is reported in the Map Network Drive/Browse dialogue. Windows sees it well enough to list it as a network drive but reports it as unavailable for some daft reason.