dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 (edited) I have set up a bunch of proactive scripts for various sources and media. Retrospect has worked through them all ok. Now, it has worked its way back around and is, for the first time, running a script for the second time. This should therefore just be an incremental backup to what it did before, but it is showing the full 160GB, 1.5 million files, left to go, and is working through them. The media is a 1TB USB drive, several of the scripts have backed up various sources to it. I did not recycle the media. The space consumed on the media shows the original backup must still be there. The log for the current process begins by saying '+ Normal backup'. I went into 'Past Backups' and am able to view the content of the original backup, so I think this means it has not been recycled. Can Retrospect write an entirely separate backup of the one source to the same media set? Any suggestions? Edited April 23, 2009 by Guest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted April 23, 2009 Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 1) Check the Media Set to make sure the member is not marked as missing/lost/damaged from the member summary. 2) If the script has multiple destinations then you need to confirm it is writing to a destination that already contains data or is it a new different destination? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 (edited) Media Set | Summary says nothing about missing, lost or damaged. Status says 'Ready'. Members 1, Backups 5 (the script writes several sources to the same set), Files 2 million (approx) etc. The script only has this one destination so far. I was going to add another once I saw everything behaving correctly. Edited April 23, 2009 by Guest corrected reference to multiple scripts Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted April 23, 2009 Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 One the proactive backup is done copying files, try an immediate backup of just a folder from that source. Does it also want to recopy everything? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 (edited) Thanks for your help. I have paused this second run in its early stages. Can I stop it and try your suggestion, or do I have to let this repeat run its course? I hope not since it's large and will waste space and time. As mentioned before, I can view the content of the original, so that must be intact. Just not sure if the second run, aborted part way through, would interfere with your test. If it would, can I still abort this one, and run your test on one of the other backups done by the same script, before they get a chance to do their next proactive backup? then, if they behave in the test, I can let the proactive have a go and see what that does then. Update: I stopped that one and am running your test, will post result shortly... Edited April 23, 2009 by Guest update Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted April 23, 2009 Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 If the folder is small, then run the test twice for the same folder. This will tell you if the "matching" is working or if the items in the folder appear different with each backup attempt. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 I stopped the proactive backup and did your test once. It backed up only a few files, not all of them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 and I ran it again and it backed up just a few files again (14 instead of 8 and only 98KB this time). I think I made a bad choice of folder (the iTunes library, so I think caches files and stuff get altered) but it's clearly not backing up the whole thing each time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 and now the same script just fired up again, backing up a different source to the same Media Set, and it's copying everything again. So it seems proactive backs up everything, but manual does not. As far as I know, it is not possible to set a proactive to anything other than incremental, so I don't think I set it up wrong. did I? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 a different proactive script just ran, copying a different source (a Mac client) to a different Media Set, and this copied just a few files. So this proactive script worked ok. Sorry to keep posting, but I figure the info might help you build a picture of what's going on! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted April 23, 2009 Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 Is the problem isolated to a specific media set? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 well, it's just run up the same script again which is now backing up another different source to the same media set. This is also copying everything. So far it's been the same script and same media set. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 Now another script is backing up correctly, incrementally, to a different media set. This is with the same source that was previously being backed up, incorrectly, in full. So it's not the source? But I cannot separate the media set from the script, only that one script uses that media set, and no other media sets. Any idea how I could proceed? I'll write another script to do one of the backups the 'problem' script has been doing. If it's the media set, the problem should occur there too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted April 23, 2009 Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 If the problem is with one specific media set, then you can try a catalog rebuild. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2009 Well now I'm a bit confused. I started to ask it to rebuild the catalogue, but I'm not sure if it did or not. It appeared not to, but then I noticed my test proactive script had started to run, so I figured that was why. Now it's finished scanning I see it is only backing up a limited set of files. This is to the media set in question. So this indicates either the catalog rebuild fixed it or the old script was at fault (is this possible?). Could the catalog of 300GB (ish) of backups be rebuilt in seconds? If not, it cannot have been done, if it happened it took seconds. I see no logs about it, would it be logged? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 24, 2009 (edited) It appears not to be the backup set, but maybe the script? I have a new test proactive script running that repeatedly backs up that same source, the local Macintosh HD, to the same Media Set. It only ever backs up a relatively small amount of data. Clearly the new script is incrementing where the old script is not, despite using identical source and media. The original proactive script still tries to back up everything. Edited April 24, 2009 by Guest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 24, 2009 I manually recreated the backup script. I did not copy the old one, just set up a new one. That script works correctly, incrementally. The one difference I noticed when comparing my new script with the old is in Options | Proactive Backup | Matching. The new script has the default settings: Match source files... is ticked Don't add duplicate files... is ticked In the old script, the second of these is unticked. I don't know why I changed that in the old script. Is this the problem? I thought this related to copying files duplicated on the source and was not about duplicating on the backup. But looking at the 3rd option there about same path, I see that would not make sense. So is this the problem? Would it mean my backup is now still sound, but has files wastefully duplicated, taking up more space? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 24, 2009 Although if it was this option, it should have affected the other sources also, but it did not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted April 24, 2009 Report Share Posted April 24, 2009 In the old script, the second of these is unticked. This is the problem. The default matching options got changed along the way, basically turning off matching. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dangermouse Posted April 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 24, 2009 OK, thanks. I don't get why it only affected one source on the script, but we seem to have resolved it. I hope you guys get some manuals out soon, it would cut down on your support workload. From me, at least! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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