Bad backup set header found thousands of times in log

[steviestar]

I see I'm not the only one having this issue, but I haven't seen any definitive answers yet. Here's my situation: I'm running the latest version of Retrospect 6.1 on a 10.4.5 machine which is the dedicated Retrospect server. We just switched from backing up to tape to backing up to hard drive. I bought a dual-bay firewire drive enclosure to which Retrospect writes. In addition, I have two additional removable drive trays that act as the offsite backup. So, in total, I have four drives for two backup sets.

 

After first running the backup and getting zillions of the "Bad backup set header found" errors, I tried putting backup drive on a separate bus, so I bought another firewire card and put it on there, but no dice! I still get all these errors. I've also done the obligatory recycle backup AND backed up to the second set (i.e. a completely different set of drives). They, too, give the same errors.

 

I'm going to eliminate the possibility that the bus or the drives themselves our bad, which leaves the Firewire enclosure or Retrospect or something else that I can't see. (I did read somewhere that certain Oxford chips and Retrospect don't get on well. Does anyone have any information to corroborate this? I believe my external enclosure does use an oxford chip, but so do most!)

 

If anyone has any thoughts at all, I'd love to hear them!

 

Cheers,

Stephen

[CallMeDave]

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I'm running the latest version of Retrospect 6.1 on a 10.4.5 machine...

 

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Well, I suppose that's sufficiently vague for online tech support.

 

>I'm going to eliminate the possibility that the bus or the drives themselves our bad, which

>leaves the Firewire enclosure or Retrospect or something else that I can't see

 

If you have two suspected causes, change one of them and test again.

 

In this case, use a different physical FireWire bridge; something high quality such as those sold by Granite Digital. If the problem goes away you've solved the mystery.

[gnord]

I had a similar problem with only hundreds of "Bad backup set header found" errors.

 

The setup that resulted in errors with G3 to G5 clients:

Retrospect 6.1.126

Stock 350 MHz B&W with 320 MB RAM running MacOS 10.3.9

250 GB LaCie Firewire drive

 

The setup that resulted in sucessful backups with the same clients:

Retrospect 6.1.126

Stock 1.42 MHz MacMini with 1 GB SDRAM running MacOS 10.4.5

and the same 250 GB LaCie Firewire drive and firewire cable.

 

In this case it was the machine not Retrospect nor the Drive.

 

Beaniite

[sharpshooter9534]

I'm getting the exact same errors using Retrospect 6.1. I was archiving files from a LaCie Firewire 800 drive to CDs but, no matter what I did, I kept getting the errors. Finally, I copied my files to a partition on my G4, thinking that would solve all my problems. Unfortunately, I'm getting the exact same errors. Firewire is obviously not the problem. The problem is Retrospect.

[CallMeDave]

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I'm getting the exact same errors

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It's pretty hard to report "the exact same" anything without any exact information being part of the discussion.

 

- Can you provide a part of the Operations Log that details what your error looks like?

 

> Firewire is obviously not the problem.

 

If you're not using any FireWire devices, then this is indeed obvious.

 

> The problem is Retrospect

 

This is unproven.

 

- What CD-R drive is being used?

- What driver is being used for the CD-R?

- What brand of CD-R media is being used?

- What happens when other brands of CD-R media is tried?

- "Archive" is a specific feature of Retrospect; is that where you're seeing the error?

- Do you see the error when you attempt other Retrospect operations (such as Backup)?

 

It's pretty important to provide information when reporting problems; it's the best way to get helpful replies online.

 

Dave