scheduled backup simply doesn't work

[sgannon]

Hello,

 

I've had Retrospect for a couple years and despite much tinkering, I never quite got it working on my former machine -- when my hard disk crashed and I discovered that, ha ha, Retrospect didn't appear to have backed anything up, I gave up on the software.

 

Now I have a new machine (MacPro) and am making a renewed attempt to automatically back up (duplicate, actually) my entire startup hard disk. I just bought a 300gb internal SATA drive dedicated solely to copying over all my files weekly. I scheduled a duplication script for this morning after I left for work (I didn't sleep the computer before leaving, just in case).

 

Got home, and nothing was backed up.

 

My settings:

Source: [startup disk]

Destination: [dedicated disk] -- Replace Corresponding Files

Selecting: All files

Options: Verification on; Don't backup FileVCCaule sparseimages (no idea what that means, but it was the default)

Scheduled executions: weekly, including this morning's failed one.

 

What could I possibly be doing wrong?

 

Many thanks,

Sean

[CallMeDave]

Quote:

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when my hard disk crashed and I discovered that, ha ha, Retrospect didn't appear to have backed anything up, I gave up on the software.

 

---

 

Retrospect contains many features that allow the responsible user to monitor and confirm its use. The Operations Log will document all the files copied, the Backup Report provides visual indicators of scripts that fail to run, etc. If you waited until a catastrophic hardware failure before checking to see if had valid backups, you shared in the cause of your data loss.

 

> What could I possibly be doing wrong?

 

Hard to say.

 

- What does the Operations Log say?

 

- Have you had any successful auto-launches of the program?

Create a script, File Backup Set with Source a small folder defined as a Subvolume. Schedule it to launch a few minutes in the future, and quit the program.

 

- If the program does not launch at (around) the scheduled time, confirm that the "retrorun" unix process is alive on the machine.