jhaffner Posted September 16, 2009 Report Share Posted September 16, 2009 I am running Retrospect 6.1.230 on a G4/400 under Mac OS X Server 10.4.11. I am backing up to an AIT firewire drive. The client machine is a MacPro tower (Intel) running 10.4.11. This setup has been stable for a several years. I have made no changes to the OS or the software on either machine for at _least_ a month. Last week I started seeing "Can't read file "blah.fp7" error -40 (file positioning error)" lines in my Retrospect log. The errors happen during the Copying process. An earlier thread (2005) suggested that there might be a problem with the client volume I'm trying to back up. I ran Disk Utility to repair the volume, and no errors were reported. The error -40 has stopped today, but I remain concerned about fallout down the road. The "problem" volume is the repository for server-made backups of our mission-critical FileMaker database. It is not a startup volume. I have searched Retrospect's knowledge base and these forums, Googled the entire web, read the manual, and found no definitive answer to what this error means. What are the possible causes for error -40? Should I be concerned about the integrity of my database backups or the volume? Is there another source of information I should have considered in my search? Best Regards, John Haffner IS Manager Merit Resource Group, Inc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted September 17, 2009 Report Share Posted September 17, 2009 (edited) I can think of three reasons for getting the -40 error, some of which doesn't apply to your situation. 1) The disk catalog is corrupt. 2) Trying to read/write a file larger than the file system allows. (AFP, NFS and SMB is considered as file systems in this case). Old versions of AFP allowed only 2GB large files and if your file is larger... 3) An application that stores the file size in (for instance) a signed 32-bit integer, which limits the useable file size to 2GB. Or an unsigned 32-bit integer, which limits the file size to 4GB. EDIT: A fourth situation. A "live" file is truncated by Filemaker between the Retrospect scanning of the disk and the actual backup of the file. Edited September 17, 2009 by Guest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jhaffner Posted September 17, 2009 Author Report Share Posted September 17, 2009 Hi Lennart, Thanks for taking the time to respond. Unfortunately, I don't think any of the situations apply in this case. That's what makes it so puzzling. Corrupt disk catalog: I ran disk utility on the volume, and it found no problems. File Size: all the files in question are well under 2GB, in fact, I think well under 500MB. "Active" FileMaker files: These files are not active. They are backups made by the FileMaker Server software. I _never_ touch the live files with Retrospect. I don't know how FileMaker stores the file on the drive, but the file sizes are well under the limits stated. Thanks for your help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dayhox Posted September 17, 2009 Report Share Posted September 17, 2009 Hmm I am getting the same error, however I am backing up my bz2 ed FMP DB files. I am using 10.5.8 Server so am thinking that the only relation is the fact that FMP DBs are the culprit. d Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jhaffner Posted September 17, 2009 Author Report Share Posted September 17, 2009 Curiouser and curiouser... What version of FMP or FMS are you running? I am running FileMaker Server 9.0.3.325. John Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jhaffner Posted November 6, 2009 Author Report Share Posted November 6, 2009 Sorry this has taken so long to follow up. Four days after my last post, the client hard drive died. It ended up becoming completely unresponsive. So, I guess the lesson is that file positioning errors (error -40) indicate a failing hard drive. John Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.