Groom always fails, error -2241

[MrPete]

I'm running the latest Retrospect Pro Windows 7.6, on a Vista 32 system. (Yay! The permission bug is fixed!)

 

My problem: grooming a disk ALWAYS fails, with error 2241.

 

I have rebuilt the catalog.

 

What I'm trying to do:

* External (eSATA) drive is full. A default groom did not free up enough space

* I went in and deleted some very old snapshots, from before a system was reconfigured

* Upon exiting the volume/snapshot dialog box, it asked if i want to groom now

* I say yes, it works for a while, then dies and tells me I need to rebuild the catalog.

* I rebuild and loop.

 

Did it twice, no joy.

 

Any suggestions/hints?

 

Other than this problem, everything is happy and stable.

 

[Mayoff]

Have you read this?

 

http://kb.dantz.com/article.asp?article=9629&p=2

 

[MrPete]

Yes. None of the issues there apply. This is a Vista 32 system with gobs of spare memory, disk, etc... and runs with very high performance. (Retrospect typically shows 2.5+G per minute data rates, i.e. 40+MB/sec!)

 

The first automated groom of the drive took place earlier in this cycle, and went to completion without trouble.

 

The problem appears related to post-snapshot-deletion grooming.

 

In my case, I'm wanting to delete everything related to a volume that is no longer needed.

 

While we're on the topic, I have a question: it is possible to delete snapshots but not sessions. Is session-deletion a logical impossibility? Seems it would make sense.

[Mayoff]

You never delete sessions. You can only delete/groom snapshots.

[MrPete]

Right, I know that.

 

So... barring any further suggestions, it would appear I have found a bug. I'll see if I can reach the tech support folk.

[MrPete]

Further update, in the meantime:

 

I've done some more testing.

 

1) If I delete a single snapshot, then on dialog-close say "Groom now", it ALWAYS fails with -2241 error. Always.

 

2) If I do the same thing, but say "Groom later" and immediately begin a backup that will require grooming, it ALWAYS succeeds without problem. The only difference (visible to me): Groom Now or Groom Later.

 

3) Auto-grooming without me touching the snapshots has always succeeded.

 

4) If I delete several snapshots, then do a ("later") auto-groom, it sometimes succeeds, sometimes fails with -2241.

 

Finally, I note that this is important functionality.

 

Case in point: I have a large volume that no longer exists in the "real world" but is still part of a large and important backup set. I need to recover the space used by backups of that volume. The only way to do so is to delete all snapshots of that volume, and groom. (My current workaround attempt: delete snapshots one at a time, do an auto-groom, rinse and repeat )

 

[MrPete]

Update: by deleting a single snapshot at a time, and using "Groom later", I was able to work around this bug and eliminate the unneeded volume backups from the backup set.