Retrospect & Vista 64

[cfieldgate]

Hi all,

 

I hope this information helps someone.

 

I have been running Retrospect for several years now - and I like it. But when I built a new PC with Vista Home Premium x64 I started to find I could not get scheduled backups to work.

 

So, I have been doing some testing :confused:.

 

I have a QNAP (Linux based) NAS to hold my backups under a Network Share (SMB). To connect to it I have to set Retrospect up to log on as a specified user (Preferences | Execution | Security). This all worked fine under XP Professional, however, under this Vista setup my scheduled backups failed to run unless I was logged in as an administrator with Retrospect open!

 

So I set up an iScsi volume on my NAS and set Retrospect back to run as the logged in user. As I no longer need any credentials to access a network share, as the iScsi acts like a direct attached disk (just like a USB or Firewire drive), the schedules run fine :oneeye:.

 

Logging back in after a scheduled backup however and starting Retrospect only brought up the Retrospect activity monitor, which shows, well, nothing. Retrospect is still open you see, but not visible to the logged on account (or the Activity Monitor it seems). I then opened Task Manager and set it to view all process, and there it was :confused2:. So, I killed the Retrospect.exe *32 process and Retrospect could be started as normal again.

 

So what does all this mean? Well, for those who run scheduled backups as the logged in user (the default) all is well, except that only by killing the Retrospect.exe *32 process, or a reboot, will they be able to access the Retrospect GUI after a scheduled backup has run. For those who need to set up Retrospect to run as a specified user to enable access to network shares, well they won’t be able to run scheduled backups and must run them manually.

 

This is a sorry state of affairs, and one that for me means I will be moving to another backup product soon once I have completed my evaluations. So long Retrospect :eyes:.

[poorman]

Thanks for documenting your efforts and sharing what you learned.

 

The empty status monitor issue has been discussed at length in other posts. EMC never acknowledged that there is an issue, despite significant investigation by multiple customers. It continues to come up as an issue in new forum posts. I'm hopeful that it's been fixed in 7.7, but the release notes aren't out so I can't tell without paying for the 7.6->7.7 upgrade.

 

Similarly, others have also grappled with getting Retrospect to reliably automatically start backups on Vista. I've been successful only when setting it to run under the credentials of the currently-logged-in user. Again, I hope this is addressed in 7.7.

 

I'm trying hard to continue to use (and recommend) Retrospect, but EMC isn't making it easy! :confused:

 

-- Pete

Edited December 7, 2009 by Guest

[cfieldgate]

RESULTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

 

I set up the two Retrospect Services to log in as an administrator with access rights to my NAS. I then set Retrospect to run as the logged on user.

 

I logged off and my backups ran at the appointed time :content: . This is my first success at scheduling on Windows Vista with UAC on. At last, no more manual backups!

Edited December 14, 2009 by Guest

[yatcher]

So the key is to change the credentials on the service accounts?

 

I'm not sure this will totally work though in my case on sbs 2008 if I set retrospect to run as the logged in user. The logged in user will be administrator or no one if the server is logged out but the account required to run retrospect is RBU as the account setup for exchange backup.

 

I will try and report back.

[poorman]

The key here is the meaning of "currently logged in user".

 

When you run Retrospect interactively the currently-logged-in-user is the user who logged in at the display/keyboard, as you'd naturally expect. When Retrospect is started by the Retrospect Launcher service, however, the "currently logged in user" is the user ID under which the service is running. A completely different user can be logged in interactively and Retrospect will still be auto-launched as the user that is running the service.

 

See the thread at http://forums.dantz.com/showtopic.php?tid/32600/ for a discussion about changing the user ID used to run the Retrospect Launcher service.

 

-- Pete