Transfer DOES NOT WORK!

[SReubart]

I have wasted the past several weeks messing around with Retrospect 5.0 and would switch to ANYTHING else at this point. The details:

 

 

 

I back up to external FireWire hard drives. (All volumes are HFS+.) Each backup area is about 24GB. Once a week I need to copy the previous week's data and catalog to an external FireWire 20GB drive to go offsite.

 

 

 

Sometimes my total backup file is larger than will fit onto the 20GB disk. I have tried time and time again--with Retrospect 5.0 under both OS X and OS 9.2.2--to get the Copy>Transfer command to work correctly. I NEED this command to copy to another backup set, eliminating some files as it does so, so that the destination set will be small enough to fit. (I use the file selection criteria to exclude the files from my own computer, of which there are quite a few.)

 

 

 

The program scans the source dataset, and looks like it is selecting only the files I told it to. But when it finishes searching, it claims that I have selected more than 900GB of data! So of course it refuses to copy it to the destination set, since it would not fit.

 

 

 

Yes, there are a lot of files (about 75,000), but they all currently fit in about 20GB of space. This seems to be a quite obvious bug, as it is physically impossible for my files to occupy 900GB on a 24GB drive.

 

 

 

I have rebuilt the source catalog numerous times. I have run every disk utility on all of the disks. This problem occurs in both the OS X and OS 9 versions. (I switched my server from X to 9.2 to try to get around this problem, in fact.)

 

 

 

Retrospect seems to be grossly miscalculating the total size of the selected files, and therefore will not allow me to create my offsite backups. I consider this a MAJOR problem.

 

 

 

Anyone have any ideas? (And please don't ask about hardware configurations, etc., as everything works perfectly except in Retrospect.)

 

 

[AmyJ]

After setting up the transfer, but before clicking the final Transfer button, click on Files Chosen. Try marking all files in this window. What does the file count in the tope right corner indicate when all files are marked?

 

 

 

What is the exact error message that you are seeing? Will the transfer allow you to proceed after acknowledging the error?

[SReubart]

Hmmm...when all of the files were marked, it said there was 924GB to back up--not possible. So I unmarked everything and looked at every item individually.

 

 

 

It seems that either Retrospect or the operating system got confused somewhere, as there were a number of individual files (with the same names as other files) that were all the same size: 140.1GB! This seemed to be the magic number for all of these strange files. When I modified my search to exclude any files over 1000MB, the amount of data to be backed up shrank tremendously. The number was still wrong--about 34GB--but when I told it to back up only the most recent files, it got down to a very manageable 14GB.

 

 

 

So there is still a possible bug in Retrospect, since it may have created these weird catalog entries of 104.1GB. But at least I was able to find a way to create my offsite backups.

 

 

 

THANKS!

 

 

[Mayoff]

Every time I have seen this type of problem, it was caused by corruption on the hard disk. I suggest running Disk First Aid or Apple's Disk Tools on the drive.

 

 

 

Identify which files Retrospect thinks are "giant", go to the finder and look at the files. Are they useable? Does the Get Info window indicate anything strange? Do they have any unusual filename? What size does the finder report?

 

 

 

In the Retrospect Browser, how many "bytes" are listed for the file vs "size on disk"?