Console 16.1 erases client options

[Don Lee]

I upgraded my server to Retro 16.1 recently, and started using Console 16.1 as well. I immediately started having trouble with the options on the clients being cleared. All of the "Allow client to:" options would be cleared every time I "touched" a client with the console.

This is not a problem with Retro console 14.6, nor console 16.6

It's pretty annoying on the 16.1 console.

[DavidHertzberg]

Don Lee,

Upgrade immediately to Retrospect Mac 16.6.  Don't pass "Go", don't collect $119 🤣 —which I assume you already paid for a Desktop Edition upgrade.

Retrospect Console 16.1 has "joined the choir invisible".  Why are you using it? 🙄   I've been totally on Retrospect Mac 16.6 since December 2019.

A fast eyeball search of the Retrospect Mac cumulative Release Notes doesn't disclose a fix for your 16.1 Console bug.  However a number of existing features ended up broken in the 15.0–16.5 "go big or go home" era of Retrospect development; most of them seem to have been fixed by 16.6.

As the first long paragraph of this post in another thread mentions, Retrospect "Inc." apparently isn't above obfuscating who discovered a Retrospect bug that backup administrators reported before it was fixed. 😎  So if an engineer discovered the bug noted in your OP and fixed it by 16.6, he wouldn't necessarily have put a mention of it into the Release Notes—because IMHO the engineers are ashamed of 30 years of inadequate alpha-testing.

Edited October 18, 2020 by DavidHertzberg
Add additional paragraph about why fixing _this_ bug wouldn't necessarily have been mentioned in the Release Notes.

[Don Lee]

Console 16.6 appears inadequate. It appears that this bug is in 16.1 server.

I am using 16.1 because until very recently, I had Mac OS X 10.6 machines, and 16.1 is the last version that supports Mac OS X 10.6.

[fredturner]

This probably doesn't help the v16 problem specifically, but there may be a general problem when upgrading to new versions. I just had this happen going from 17.5 to 18. Wondered why hundreds of extra GB started getting backed up. ALL of the checkboxes were cleared for ALL clients. So all of the excluded folders from clients were no longer excluded. Fun!

As a side note, I don't know about you, but I spend inordinate amounts of time trying to handhold this software like this and make sure it doesn't choke and leave my clients w/o backups. This has been a constant since the v8 debacle. I really just wish that we could forego worrying about adding shiny, new features in each paid upgrade, and instead just make the software not do weird things that cause workarounds, constant handholding, and missed backups.

Fred

[DavidHertzberg]

fredturner and Don Lee,

I should have recommended to each of you that you create a Support Case for a bug.  Here's how to do that. 

As I stated in the last sentence of this up-thread post, the Retrospect engineers going back to Dantz Development 30 years ago have a renowned history of inadequate alpha testing.  (If the head of Retrospect Tech Support objects to my use of the adjective "renowned", I can easily post a dozen links—each to a post by a separate technically-knowledgeable frequenter of the Ars Technica Macintoshian Achaia Forum—asserting the lack of alpha testing within the first two pages of the Mac Ach thread on Retrospect I started in 2016—which I still post to.)  No less an authority than JG Heithcock—the current General Manager of Retrospect "Inc." and the former CEO of Retrospect Inc., as reported by the press at the time of the StorCentric acquisition,  "described the new Retrospect as a virtual business, with fewer engineers than at EMC, who use Google Chat for meetings."  IMHO that probably means their X.0 alpha testing consists of testing backups of their WFH "client" machines using the latest X.0 "backup server" build on whatever centralized machine Retrospect "Inc." uses for testing; if whatever backup scripts they use seem to work, the engineers declare the build to have been alpha-tested.  That's why I keep urging posters on these Forums to file Support Cases; Tech Support will respond asking the administrator to run an instrumented build, but it's because the engineers routinely ignore any bug reported in a Support Case unless Tech Support can "reproduce the error on their own equipment."

If you still have OS X 10.6 machines, Don Lee, you could probably run Retrospect 14.6 and back up using the same Media Set(s) you use with Retrospect 16.6—because I don't think the format of Catalog Files changed between the two releases—I think I actually tried this a couple of years ago.  If that doesn't work, you could do the equivalent of how I backup my late ex-wife's G4 Digital Audio Mac—which is to run Retrospect Mac 6.1 on its OS X 10.3.9 drive and back up directly to my faithful HP DAT72 tape drive.