Retrospect Engine very active, but empty Retrospect Console

[kyeoh]

I returned to my computer to find the fan at high speed. Activity monitor shows the RetroEngine running at 120%. A screenshot is attached. Strange, none of the target drives are available.

 

I fired up Retrospect Console. Strange. Activities is blank, none of the local sources are visible, only one of the clients is visible, the scripts page is empty. A screenshot is attached.

 

I quit Retrospect Console & started it up again. Seemed fine for several seconds, with all tabs filled appropriately, but the Engine still very active. Then, the Console hanged & is still doing so, with the Activities tab almost emptied out again.

 

What's going on here?

[CallMeDave]

I returned to my computer to find the fan at high speed. Activity monitor shows the RetroEngine running at 120%. A screenshot is attached. Strange, [color:red]none of the target drives are available[/color].

 

What does this mean?

- What are "the target drives" in this context?

- Where is this drive not "available?"

[kyeoh]

Sorry, I was too vague.

 

By "target drive", I meant "a drive where the backup is destined to be backed up onto". So, the internal HD might be a source drive for the backup. And an external HD might be a target drive. Unfortunately, in Retrospect Speak, both these drives are called Sources.

 

When I said "not available", what I meant was that the external drive wasn't physically plugged into the computer.

 

P.S. I used Activity Monitor to Force Quit the RetroEngine. The fan slowed down, but when I visited the Retrospect system preference, I was unable to Start the Engine. Clicking the Start button asked for the admin password, but remained in the "Start" state, indicating that the Engine wasn't running. This was fixed using the "sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.retrospect.launchd.retroengine.plist" documented in another thread.

[CallMeDave]

By "target drive", I meant "a drive where the backup is destined to be backed up onto".

So, the internal HD might be a source drive for the backup. And an external HD might

be a target drive.

 

Not exactly accurate. Retrospect writes data to Members of its Media Set. Those Members can be tapes, optical disks, or volumes of a hard drive.

 

To use a hard drive's volume as a Member of a Media set, that volume must be available to Retrospect; which means available in the Source window, either as a directly attached hard drive or as an authenticated NAS device.

 

As problematic as Retrospect Speak is on a good day, using invented terms can too often add to reader confusion. A more accurate, more specific (but not completely specific) way to describe these drives might have been "the external FireWire 800 drive(s) containing Members of Disk Media Sets."

 

I reported a bug on 10/6/2009 about how Retrospect behaves when a NAS storing an active Member of a Disk Media Set becomes unavailable to the Engine host machine; I didn't try reproducing this with locally attached hard drives (you don't reveal how your external drive was attached), but perhaps this is the same thing.

 

It's bug #23467; I'm hoping it's fixed in this month's anticipated update.

 

 

Dave