Engine crashed: sources vanish

[twickland]

Well, after many happy (and other) years with Retrospect 1.3 through 6.1, I finally got the courage to try Retrospect 8. First impression: not so good.

 

This is a clean install of Retrospect 8.2 (399) on a brand-new 3.2 GHz quad-core Mac Pro w/6 GB RAM, running 10.6.4. Engine and console are on the same machine.

 

I installed Retrospect end of the day Friday. Just for fun, I added one client and then shut down the computer.

 

Today, I began the slow (compared to 6.1) process of adding back the rest of the clients, defining subvolumes (oops, "Favorite Folders"), and assigning tags.

 

About an hour and a half into the process, I highlighted a Windows client volume in the sources list and clicked "Add Favorite." After a brief period of trying to access the source, the Favorites window closed. I assumed this meant the client was now offline, and so I moved on to the next client, also a Windows machine. This time, the window populated with that client volume's root directory but, as I looked closer, there were two C: drives listed: one for the client volume I was currently accessing, and one for the client I has previously been trying to access.

 

I thought, "Hmm, interesting bug; gotta report that," highlighted and added the correct Favorite Folder, and moved on.

 

Things then seemed to be going well for the few minutes, until I got the "Disconnected" screen, indicating that the engine had crashed.

 

I restarted the engine, but when the console reconnected, all the clients, favorites, and tags I had added this morning were gone from the Sources window. I was back where I had been at the end of the day Friday.

 

Has anybody else seen this? More to the point, how often does data get written to Config80.dat? (I'm assuming that this is where the data on sources, etc., are stored.) Is there any way to force a save so I don't lose everything if/when the engine next crashes?

 

Thanks.

[Maser]

If you have a series of *hard* crashes, the config80.dat file can get so corrupted, that Retrospect will start clean and you either have to start all over or restore the "config80.dat" file from backup.

 

From what I recall, config80.dat will write to config80.bak every 90 minutes or so automatically (I'm not 100% certain on this -- it may depend on what's going on with the program such as how many proactive scripts you have running, etc...)

 

It will also update the .bak file when you manually stop the engine.

 

If you haven't made a backup of that file yet (and it doesn't sound like it), you'll have to start clean, unfortunately.

[twickland]

If you have a series of *hard* crashes, the config80.dat file can get so corrupted, that Retrospect will start clean and you either have to start all over or restore the "config80.dat" file from backup.

It sounds like that may well be what happened.

 

If so, that doesn't bode well, as I had only logged into Retrospect twice, for less than 2 hours total, and only worked on source configurations--no scripts or rules, to say nothing of no backups as yet.

[twickland]

An update on this issue:

 

I was finding that the only way for me to get Retrospect to write to Config80.dat was to stop the engine. Starting with a fresh Config80 or a fresh plist brought no improvement.

 

I finally uninstalled and reinstalled the complete software (engine and console), though I did retain the Config80.dat file I had painstakingly built and saved.

 

Since that time, Retrospect seems to be behaving pretty much as I had expected. Changes to Retrospect's preferences now cause an immediate write to Config80; otherwise, Retrospect updates the file periodically (looks like every couple of hours). The frequent engine crashes have also stopped.