Retrospect 8.1.626 issues

[Frank N Berry]

We've been using Retrospect 8.1.626 for about a week now and here are some of the issues we've seen. We're not sure if everyone has these issues, but were wondering if these were known issues being worked on or if these are peculiar to our setup:

 

1) Backup performance. Our Mac Pro 4,1 (Quad Core 2 x 2.26GHz) runs Retrospect 8.1.626 (Engine and Console) and backing up our RAID-5 eSATA Files volume is nice at around 1000-2000 MB/min. Network backups are another matter. Our clients are Leopard (X.5.8) workstations that run Retrospect Client 6.3.208 and Windows XP clients running Retrospect Client 7.6.107. We only backup after business hours (8pm to 7am) and all workstations are late G5, 2006-2008 Mac Pros, or Dell Precision 6x0 Workstations attached via Gigabit copper (single 48 port GigE switch). We also only backup the Users folder (Documents and Settings on Windows) and we're seeing 100-200 MB/min for Windows and 200-300 MB/min for Macs. This is drastically different from the performance we got from the same systems (Client 6.2.234 Mac and Client 7.6.107 on Windows) backing up to a PowerMac G4/1GHz on an Exabyte VXA-320 Storageloader (Firewire 800) running Retrospect 6.1.230 (driver 6.1.15.101). Windows clients on that system gave us 400-600 MB/min and Macs gave us 600-800 MB/min. Anyone else seeing better client backup speeds or is there anything we should check to make sure we're not getting the best client backup performance currently (considering that there is a performance problem that EMC knows about and is working on)?

 

2) Schedules. We've posted a different thread on this subject but essentially, you either have to schedule a single Script (say Backup) to Stop 'at fixed time' or 'when done'---you can't do anything in between. So you can't have a single schedule for that script that says "run Friday at 8pm to Monday at 7am then run 8pm to 7am Mon-Thurs".

 

3) Erasing tapes. We use a Quantum Superloader 3 with an LTO-3 HH drive (SCSI attached via an Atto UL5D). Once you load a tape into the drive and then click Erase (to prep a new tape with correct name for example), then confirm and it begins to erase, the Console no longer responds to any other commands. You can't click anything or even close the Console window. You can only Minimize it but that doesn't allow you to do anything after you've Maximized it again. The only solution is to Quit and then start up the Console again.

 

4) Interface. When starting up the Retrospect Console (we run the Engine on the same Mac Pro), the window is maximized below the Dock. Makes it a pain to have to 're-maximize' it every time so that it fits above the Dock (assuming that we don't want to hide the Dock). Also, when you click on Storage Devices, the Summary/Options panel is displayed by default. We have to minimize that each time to see all 16 slots of our loader. Would be nice if it remembered each item's Summary/Options panel setting so that, for example, it's hidden for Storage Devices, while it's showing for Past Backups.

 

 

Sorry if the above has been hashed and rehashed and we're waiting on EMC, but just curious if we're doing anything unusual. Thanks!

[samvenning]

A lot of people are reporting similar problem with poor performance to Retrospect network clients (see thread "very very slow backup").

 

It seems EMC is aware of the problem. EMC hasn't provided a response (formal or informal) in this forum for many months. This is very serious for our company and I'm afraid I now have to investigate alternative solutions such as Atempo's Time Navigator and Archiware's PreStore. For the moment I've removed Retrospect 6.3 client from all computers (restored Retrospect 6.2 client) and use Retrospect 6 on an older Xserve PPC computer. I've wasted a lot of time on this and I'm very unhappy with EMC.

[Maser]

I don't think it's the client. I did some quick tests here. The Retrospect 8 engine sure appears to limit transfers to a max of 12MB/s (100Base-T speeds).

 

On the laptop I tested the engine with, both Mac and PC clients would never break 12MB/s with Retro 8.

 

An AFP file copy of the same client data to the engine machine was in the 33MB/s range -- as was using Retro 6 on the same Mac and PC clients.

 

PC client speed was all over the map. Mac client speed was pretty consistent at 12MB/s. Windows 7 client speed jumped all over the place (but never above 12MB/s with Retro 8...)

[waldorfm]

To my experience many poor Network performance issues, in particular with high data loads, are often a result of a network device configuration mismatch. The computer's NIC and network Switch port, both have to be set to either Auto-negotiate (default), or fixed, but not mixed. Many network specialists may still insist on setting their network equipment to fixed speeds, which used to be a good thing 10 years ago.