Unchecking "Skip this member" - sometimes it resumes, sometimes it doesn't... why?

[curioffl]

We write some backups to off-box hard-drives. Occasionally there is network trouble and the drives go missing or have other problems. Retrospect often handles this in the least good way, by breaking for network-login but not sending any mail that anything is wrong.

 

More commonly though Retrospect sends a "waiting for media" mail and we find the program prompting for more media. It will say that there is zero K free in its set, "Properties" will show that it has auto-checked "Skip this member". Often when this happens, just unchecking "Skip this member" and clicking "OK" will cause Retrospect to re-look at the drive, notice that there is plenty of space (ie, whatever network trouble there was in the night is long passed) and it will then resume its backup. Other times though unchecking "Skip this member" causes Retrospect to see that there are many gigs free (ie, the drive is back) but then it does not resume, it just sits there saying that plenty of space is available.

 

Is there some way to force it to resume? (Starting the backup over always works in this case, but that's starting over which takes up a valuable grooming increment and much more time and bandwidth, ordinarily during business hours.)

 

Retrospect also exhibits the same behavior on to-disk backups if it legitimately runs out of allocated space. It will send 'waiting for media' mail, we find it waiting, we know that the disk itself has much more space but we had only allocated a certain amount for that particular set. Increasing the space sometimes causes the backup job to resume and sometimes it doesn't resume, it just sits there with plenty of space while we uncheck and recheck trying to find the combination that will make it go again.

 

We have seen this on more than one installation of Retrospect. Is there a 'force retry' somewhere?

 

Curio