Tag selection whack-a-mole

[eeolson]

Consider this video as I attempt to tag the source for 24 hour backup.To me, this completely sums up how confident I am in Retrospect.

<redacted>

Sure, I might get there in the end, but when I click on to another source, and back to this one, Retrospect has put the tag check boxes where it sees fit.

Does it even matter? Retrospect still thinks that when I say"once a day, every day" it can backup proactive clients, oh, about every seven days. That is, when it remembers them, and the client doesn't need to be reinstalled and re-added to Retrospect. Or when the engine doesn't need restarting.

[DavidHertzberg]

eeolson,

Welcome back to the Forums after 5 years! 🙄  You last complained of your first problem in 2013, when you were using Retrospect Mac 10.1.  Would it be too intrusive to ask you what version of Retrospect Mac you are using now? 🤣

The checkmarks for the two tags I have defined for sources and/or Favorite Folders are sticking fine in Retrospect Mac 16.6.  Here's why and how to file a Support Case for a bug.

Proactive backup was rewritten in March 2018 with Retrospect Mac 15.0. It's been renamed ProactiveAI (IMHO a bit of a stretch), and is now "based on a decision tree algorithm and linear regression to ensure every source is protected as often as possible".  17.0 sped "client" discovery, fixed speedup bugs.

Edited July 22, 2020 by DavidHertzberg
Used different links for "sped" and "'client' discovery", to get around a typo in the "What's New" chapter of the Retrospect 17 User's Guides that inserted "Nexan Certification" paragraph in the middle of "10x Faster ProactiveAI" paragraph

[eeolson]

Thanks David! Great to see I have followers.

I've used Retrospect on about 30-40 servers in office environments since the days of TEAC cassette tapes. I've run in on over a dozen windows servers and more Mac servers. I always liked the Windows version better, but I've move all of my Windows clients to Veeam because it seems infinitely more reliable and mature. I still run Retrospect in mac environments, and I keep my clients current on their maintenance, so all of them run the latest shipping version. Believe me, when a update comes out, I install it and hope things get better. In my opinion, the switch from Retrospect 6 to Retrospect 8 was a very large step down in reliability, and I believe they are still issuing "patches" for that. But they are patches that are packaged and sold as expensive upgrades. I work with a team of IT support professionals, and we all feel similarly about Retrospect - it needs constant babysitting, the UI is erratic, adding and working with client computers in the server is glacially slow, clients often stop communicating with the server, the server engine often needs restarting, or the host OS rebooted. But hey, I restored a client's data yesterday, so I'm glad this was one week that Retrospect did not stop working between my weekly check-ins.

So, what version are you using?

[DavidHertzberg]

eeolson,

I'm not one of your followers; I merely looked at your past posts in your Forums profile by clicking on your name.

The underlying code for the "backup server" Engines of Retrospect Windows and Retrospect Mac has been the same since late 2009.   The "stagnation" between Retrospect Windows 7.7 and 17 was only in the UI, which has been kept the same partly because of the bad reputation for reliability and temporary hardware compatibility restrictions of Retrospect Mac 8 (which was developed in a hurry after EMC reversed an end-of-lifing of the product)—but mostly because of a Windows limitation described in the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article section here.   Retrospect Mac 9 fixed the problems in Retrospect Mac 8; this immediately-preceding WP article section describes its enhancements.  Starting with the next WP article section is a version-by-version listing of the enhancements in the "backup server" between Retrospect Mac 10 and Retrospect Mac 14, which correspond to those of Retrospect Windows 8 through Retrospect Windows 12.  Retrospect 15 (whose Windows version number was bumped from 13, in order to restore version number parity with Retrospect Mac 15) enhancements included e-mail protection, what is now called ProactiveAI, Remote Backup, data hooks, and the beta of the Management Console.  Retrospect 16 enhancements included Storage Groups, deployment tools, and the features of the Management Console Add-On.  Retrospect  17 enhancements include Automated Onboarding for the Management Console, speeded-up ProactiveAI, and Restore Preflight.  In short, versions of Retrospect Mac beyond 8 exceed (green flags) just "patches that are packaged and sold as expensive upgrades".

After using Retrospect Mac from 1995 to 2010—ending with Retrospect Mac 6, I started again using Retrospect Mac 12 in 2015—following a five-year hiatus caused by the death from old age of my ancient "backup server" machine (whose PowerPC hardware was incompatible with Retrospect Mac 8). 

As I said in the second paragraph of my post directly below your OP, I'm still using Retrospect Mac 16.6—because I don't need the new features or bug fixes so far introduced with Retrospect Mac 17.

Nobody else on these Forums has reported a bug with the stickyness of Tag checkmarks. 

Some administrators—including me starting with Retrospect Mac 14—have had problems with -530 errors on client access, but I discovered a couple of years ago that I could eliminate those errors by using the “Add Source Directly” button at the bottom of the Sources->Add dialog (item 6 on page 74 of the Retrospect Mac 17 User's Guide).  In response to my Support Case, Retrospect Tech Support has agreed that my submitted logs show a problem—caused IMHO by macOS/hardware changes that affect the Piton Name Service's use of Multicast—which the engineers haven't yet been able to isolate.

What you describe for for your Proactive scripts sounds like a problem that was supposed to be fixed by the "ProactiveAI" enhancement in Retrospect 15.  Precisely what version of Retrospect Mac are you using—not just for the Clients but for the "backup server"?  Maybe your "backup server" is still running Retrospect Mac 12 (click "About Retrospect" in the "Retrospect" menu), because you're convinced you don't need to spend money upgrading. 😒