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Execution errors are they a concern?


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I've been running my backups daily, but now have been getting these execution errors. Do I need to worry about them especially in the future if a restore from the backup is needed?

 

All programs/applications are shutdown during the backups, so I don't know why there would be these errors. The previous day had 263 errors as compared to today.

 

log file:

 

8/12/2008 6:29:14 PM: Comparing dave on Macintosh HD…

File “Databaseâ€: miscompare at data offset 5,442,521,088, path: “dave/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2004 Identities/Main Identity/Databaseâ€.

File “Cookies.plistâ€: different data size (set: 454,477, vol: 454,122), path: “dave/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plistâ€.

File “com.apple.Syndication.plistâ€: different creation date/time (set: 8/12/2008 6:06:27 PM, vol: 8/12/2008 7:06:26 PM), path: “dave/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Syndication.plistâ€.

File “Database3â€: different data size (set: 7,657,472, vol: 7,658,496), path: “dave/Library/Syndication/Database3â€.

8/12/2008 7:12:08 PM: 4 execution errors.

Completed: 710 files, 7.1 GB

Performance: 154.5 MB/minute (142.1 copy, 169.3 compare)

Duration: 01:34:35 (00:00:35 idle/loading/preparing)

 

 

 

And do incremental backups still take a few hours? I'm running the same script daily which is just a simple backup to the same target location. I was told by the retrospect rep that it automatically will do an incremental after the script is first run to do a full backup. I just didn't think incrementals take this long considering not a lot of data is changing.

 

Thanks in advance for your help

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All programs/applications are shutdown during the backups, so I don't know why there would be these errors.

 

Are you sure that you quit every app?

 

The file "Database" belongs to Microsoft Entourage. This will change frequently; for example, every time you receive an email.

 

Sounds to me like Entourage and a web browser were open at some time during the backup.

 

The previous day had 263 errors as compared to today.

The longer a backup takes and the broader the variety of files included, the more comparison errors are likely to occur. For example, there are a lot of system files that are updated periodically which would cause compare errors if the update occurred during the backup or compare phase.

 

Any file that does not compare during a given backup will be backed up at the next backup time.

 

And do incremental backups still take a few hours?

 

The time a backup takes will depend on the number and size of the changed files and the speed of your backup device. In the example you cite, you were backing up 7.1 G of files. You don't say what your backup destination device was, but the approx. 160 MB/min shown in the log, while slow for a file backup to a local FW volume, may be reasonable for another backup type in your setup.

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All programs/applications are shutdown during the backups

Uh, no, unless you power off the machine.

 

Try this test. Do what you think is shutting down "all programs/applications," then launch Activity Monitor. Other then Activity Monitor itself (and it's "pmTool" daemon) count how many other things are listed (making sure "All Processes" is shown). OS X is a busy beaver.

 

I just didn't think incrementals take this long considering not a lot of data is changing.

 

Retrospect doesn't know what data has changed until it compares what's on the Source with what's on the Destination. So scanning the Source will always take about the same amount of time, even if it only ends up backing up a small data set.

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Retrospect doesn't know what data has changed until it compares what's on the Source with what's on the Destination. So scanning the Source will always take about the same amount of time, even if it only ends up backing up a small data set.

That's currently correct. One might hope that Retrospect X (server and client) would hook into the (somewhat undocumented) FSEvent syscall and receive notifications of filesystem events (changes) so that it would not have to go through the scan process. That's how Time Machine works.

 

Russ

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One might hope that Retrospect X (server and client) would hook into the (somewhat undocumented) FSEvent syscall and receive notifications of filesystem events (changes) so that it would not have to go through the scan process.

 

Yet one might assume that were this to be the case, it would be trumpeted in the currently available marketing information released so far.

 

I'm not expecting it to work the way TimeMachine works (although I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong). Pity.

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