How to designate a storage device?

[icnvrs3]

Retrospect for Mac OS !0

 

Everything is set but the entity on the left column on the first page says "0 storage device"   How to designate a storage device?    I would know what to designate if I had a button "Add storage device?  Cant find anything like that.   I need help bad....very frustrated.

 

AJ

[Lennart_T]

I think storage devices are tape stations, not hard drives.

 

You write that "Everything is set". Does that mean that you can run your backups just fine?

If not, what specific problem do you have when creating media sets and scripts?

[icnvrs3]

Thanks so much. "All is set" means on the left column the script is done(scheduled to run at 10 PM), "1 script".... the source is designated, .....and the media set is named,"1 media set" ............ but the "storage device says "0"

 

The next morning when I check "Pest Backups" and it shows today at 5 AM......1 file copied...and only from one of the 2 sources designated...... none from the other...and I know there were dozens of changes....new documents etc on the source HD.

 

So how do I designate a storage device when the left column shows 0 storage devices. Does the mac "sleeping" screw things up?

 

Thanks......Aj

[icnvrs3]

Could running Time Machine at the same time Retrospect is scheduled interfere or prevent Retrospect script from running?

 

AJ

[DavidHertzberg]

All references in this post are to the Retrospect Mac 13 User's Guide, whose .PDF you can read or download here (if you are using Retrospect Mac 10, rather than running under OS X 10, you can read or download that UG under here):

 

First, on page 27, "Storage Devices shows a list of the storage devices attached to the Retrospect server.  This list does not display hard disks, removable disks [this is a UG infiltration from Retrospect Windows—Retrospect Mac 8 and above has eliminated the Removable Disk type], or NAS volumes (those are shown under Sources); rather, it includes hardware devices such as optical and tape drives and libraries."

 

 Second, on page 40, "Media Sets are the destinations for files and folders that you back up. A Media Set consists of one or more disks, tapes, optical discs, or a single file. Individual pieces of media (for example, tapes, optical discs, or hard disks) are members of a Media Set."  If you haven't read all of Chapter 3: Fundamentals in the UG, you'd be well advised to do so.  Otherwise you're going to get a post from me that says "RTFM".  An alternative would be to look at all the appropriate Mac-labeled tutorial videos here, but—being an old fuddy-duddy—I find it easier to get information from manuals.

 

Third, this recent post from me, in a thread on the "Retrospect 9 or higher for Macintosh" forum, repeats the fact that IME Retrospect Mac can't wake sleeping Macs to run scheduled scripts.  The jury is still out on waking sleeping Macs for proactive scripts, because I don't run those and we haven't heard back from Mayoff—the head of Retrospect Support.  As discussed in that post, the Mac User's Guide contains information on Wake-on-LAN that seems to be at least obsolete (and that's based on the more charitable of my two hypotheses).

 

Good luck!

[DavidHertzberg]

icnvrs3, I'm going to make an educated guess about you, based on what you've written.  I think you've stumbled into an existing installation of Retrospect Mac (you haven't really said what version—does "Retrospect for Mac OS !0" mean Retrospect Mac 10 or Retrospect for Mac under OS X 10?), having prior experience only with Time Machine.  You assume that, like Time Machine (which I've never used because of unsuitability for my needs), you can muddle along simply by using the User Interface in the Retrospect Console app.  Well you're wrong in your assumption; Retrospect Mac was first introduced in 1985, when Steve Jobs was just about to be fired by Apple because the Mac was initially a sales flop, and has grown over the years to be vastly more sophisticated than Time Machine.  You're going to have to spend an hour or so reading portions of the appropriate Retrospect Mac User's Guide, as linked to in my previous post.

 

This post in the Ars Technica Mac forum will tell you what I had to  do to get Retrospect Mac 12.0 doing what I wanted it to do for my installation, after having not used it for 5 years.  It says it took me 10.5 hours, but—if you follow my link in the "Sources" paragraph of that post and read the whole linked-to post—you can cut that to 5.5 hours.  You can probably forget about opening port 497; that turns out not to be necessary if you turn off the software firewalls on your LAN computers—leaving the firewalling to be done by your Internet router—and don't have a router within your LAN.

 

Once you've done that, post your questions in the "Retrospect 9 or higher for Macintosh" forum, not in this forum.  We won't be able to help you unless you include your log in your post: Find your problematic execution of Retrospect by clicking Activities in the sidebar and scrolling down the List view, click the Log (as opposed to Summary) button above the detail for that execution, choose Select All and then Copy from the Edit menu, and then choose Paste from the Edit menu to copy the contents of the log for that execution into your post—editing out any log information you don't think we should see.

 

BTW Time Machine, at least prior to Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), may not consistently backup your machine(s).  I do not, however, know whether running it at the same time Retrospect is scheduled would interfere with or prevent a Retrospect script from running—but I doubt it.

[Mayoff]

If you are trying to write data to a hard disk, you will want to follow this tutorial for setting up your first backup to disk:

[DavidHertzberg]

Concerning whether you can backup a sleeping Mac client, see this even-more-recent post.

Edited April 2, 2021 by DavidHertzberg
A later post by me in the same thread I linked to says you _can't_ backup a sleeping Mac client with a Backup script.