jeffmazur Posted December 15, 2006 Report Share Posted December 15, 2006 Using Retrospect Remote 6.0.204 on a Mac OS 10.3.9 server to back up mostly OS 10.4.8 clients (approx 30) over GigE. Over the last year, I have found that incremental backups are taking longer and longer to complete. I start the backup at 1:00 AM and they used to finish by 5:00 but now I come in at 9:00 and it's still going! One thing I noticed is that even when a computer has not been used for a day, the backup still shows almost 2GB being transferred. This used to be just a small number of "maintenance files" that the OS generates but upon further inspection I found that each machine had a large (2GB) file: /private/var/log/retropds.log. Looking into this file reveals mostly an endless stream of : 1166182897: ServWait: received msg DScn 1166182898: ServWait: received msg DScn 1166182898: ServWait: received msg DScn 1166182898: ServWait: received msg DScn 1166182898: ServWait: received msg DScn 1166182898: ServWait: received msg DScn entries. What is this file? Why is it so large? Can I delete it or will it just replace itself again as a 2GB file? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted December 15, 2006 Report Share Posted December 15, 2006 Quote: What is this file? Why is it so large? Can I delete it or will it just replace itself again as a 2GB file? It's Retrospect's log file. It's large because it has a lot of data that has been appended to it. You can delete it, and it will keep growing again. You might delete it periodically. If you want to keep it but not back it up, you could add a selector item to not back up that file. Here's the KB article for the log file on Mac OS X: KB article: retropds.log - Mac OS X client Here's the KB article for the log file on Mac Classic Client: KB article: RetroClient.log - Client 5.1 At some point I believe the "feature" in the client that allowed the file to grow unbounded was fixed, so, if you update your Retrospect clients to current version, that problem should be fixed. Here's how it looks on a client that's been running about a year and a half: Code: rhwimac:~ rhwalker$ ls -l /private/var/log/retropds.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1835678 Dec 14 19:17 /private/var/log/retropds.log Not too bad, under 2 MB. See the KB article for how to delete (turn Retro client off, delete, turn client back on). You might want to update to the current version of Retrospect 6.1 and its clients. The update is free. Russ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted December 15, 2006 Report Share Posted December 15, 2006 Quote: At some point I believe the "feature" in the client that allowed the file to grow unbounded was fixed Yep; on October 12, 2005: http://kb.dantz.com/article.asp?article=8119&p=2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffmazur Posted December 18, 2006 Author Report Share Posted December 18, 2006 Thanks Guys. I did upgrade to 6.1 (which I had avoided because I didn't want it to deal with ACL's etc.). Turned off the ACL modification checking and after the first time it ran all of the retropds.log files returned to something reasonable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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