Can not back up to either of my other drives!!!

[dakota]

Starting about two weks go, I noticed that Retrospect was still running after about twelve hours. This weekend it quit with an error -116 error (unknown) - scanning incomplete.

 

I have two backup drives, one known as Backup Drive, which has Retrospect automated to duplicate once a week. This is what I have described above. I have a second drive, a Maxtor Bootable Drive which has a script on my dock- I have not really backed up to it in months, but when I tried today, I got a message that the script was not defined,

 

Since all of this, I wiped the Backup Drive, unhappily, since it had everything backed up till about a month ago. I formatted, and tried again, and now I find Retrospect is giving me the same error message, telling me that scanning is incomplete, and when I checked the volmes on Retrospect, I now have two backup drives listed ( only one appears on the desktop). One says it is offline, and occasionally I get an error -53.

 

At this point, I do not know what to do, I don't know where the problem is. I ran disk repair and permissions repair, and found no problems. I ran Techtool and found no problems.

[twickland]

You haven't described your entire setup. For example, I'm assuming your volume "Backup Drive" was the destination for your Duplicate script, but you don't mention the source volume. As far as I know, Retrospect only uses the term "scanning" for the source volume, which suggests that there may be some problem with the source. Did you also check this source volume with Disk Repair? (Assuming that the source is your boot volume, you would have needed to boot from another volume or the install disc to do so.)

 

If you haven't checked it yet, try to make a copy of the volume before doing so. If Retrospect cannot, try using SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner; even copying in Finder will save most of your important stuff.

 

You might also try running Retrospect with a clean configuration. With Retrospect not running, drag the file "Retro.config" from /Library/Preferences/Retrospect (this is in the root level Library; not the Library in your user folder) to the desktop and relaunch Retrospect. You will need to enter the serial number again, and all your scripts and lists will be gone for the moment. If you can now successfully run an Immediate Duplicate, that would suggest that the old configuration file was probably corrupt.

 

(The fact that you could see two destination "Backup Drives" was expected behavior and is not part of your problem. Retrospect tracks volumes by an internal serial number, and when you wiped the drive clean, you created a new volume, which is the one you could access and see in Finder. Once a volume is in Retrospect's database, it will continue to show it, even if it no longer exists, until you manually forget it.)

[Lennart_T]

Quote:

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As far as I know, Retrospect only uses the term "scanning" for the source volume, which suggests that there may be some problem with the source.

 

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But Retrospect also scans the destination volume to find out which files are already copied and which are not. Isn't that called "scanning", too? If not, what is it called?

 

In any case, it might be worth the trouble checking ALL hard drives with Apple's Disk Utility.

[twickland]

Quote:

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But Retrospect also scans the destination volume to find out which files are already copied and which are not. Isn't that called "scanning", too?

 

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You're right, Lennart; thanks for jogging my faulty memory.

 

Retrospect does identify the volume being scanned at the time, which would offer a clue if the operator is present at the time the script is running.

[dakota]

Okay, thanks to you all. After two days of trial and error, and running disk repair from the DVD ( found one small error), I still couldn't back up to my backup drive, so I tried backing up to my Maxtor firewire, and SuperDuper managed to pull it off. Only took five hours! Retrospect still would not back up (Sorry, Retrospect). In retrospect (pardon the pun), I all of a sudden realized how stupid I was - HD and Maxtor are 160 GB, and I have almost 125 GB on it- and here I was trying to back up to a 120 GB drive! I do think, as someone suggested above, that the LACIE 120 is "iffY" at best, anyway, so I am going to get rid of it, and buy a new 250 or 200. Anyone have any suggestions on manufacturer? I have had problems with both Maxtor and LACie, but my Maxtor seems to be functioning well at this point.

[rhwalker]

LaCie has two problems that frequently are seen. The first, in their "Porche" cases, is that the connectors on the back are not attached well. Frequent connection / disconnection of the Firewire cable can cause the crummy solder tacking that "secures" the plug to the case/bracket to fail, which, in turn, breaks the connector off of the printed circuit board. The other mode of failure is that the power supplies are marginal and often fail. The drives themselves don't seem to be that bad, but sometime, when they use a "bridge" chipset to bridge the Firewire to the drive's native interface, the bridge chips sometime have (or have had) bugs.

 

I have a LaCie 80 GB Firewire drive that is only used when we prepare to update our Xserve's OS volume, and I do a "RAID 1 Mirror Split" to clone our OS volume (itself a RAID 1 mirror) in case the update goes badly. The firewire cable has never been removed since installation, and the drive is rarely accessed (but always on), and I've never had a problem with it. But others plug and unplug their LaCie drives and have reported problems.

 

What you might want to do is to contact a reputable drive (or enclosure) vendor and ask them what they recommend, or poke about on one of the online hardware evaluation sites (Tom's, etc.).

 

Russ

[CallMeDave]

Note also that Retrospect's "Backup" feature is no the same as it's "Duplicate" feature.

 

You were apparently attempting to do the latter (for which there are other excellent OS X options), while doing the former is Retrospect's strong suit.

 

Dave