not enough memory

[mlscott]

Our department runs Retrospect Workgroup on a MacOS 9 server, backing up about 15 clients. Some clients are running OS 9, others OS X. Among the latter is my Powerbook. For several months I've had no problems. This past week, however, backups of my machine started failing deterministically. The server log shows "Scanning incomplete, error -108 (not enough memory)". The server has been running with the default allocation of 3.8MB. Increasing this amount and attempting immediate backups allowed me to get farther into the scanning process before running into trouble, but even with 70MB+ of space (all I have available on the server without thrashing) it wasn't quite enough. The scanning process finished, but the next step (whatever that was going to be) died with a similar "not enough memory" message. Two things are particularly perplexing: (1) Everything was working fine until recently, with only 3.8MB allocated to the server. I have a few more files than I used to, but not that much more! (2) When it claimed to have finished scanning (with >70MB of memory), the server was reporting a total of more than 350,000 files on my machine. Apple Disk Utility reports a total of 194,000. Before I try buying more RAM or upgrading the server to OS X (both of which pose small but non-trivial risk to a critical department resource), does anybody have any suggestions as to what may be going wrong, or how to fix it? (PS: I'm running Dantz's latest versions: Retrospect 5.0.238 and Client 5.0.540.)

[AmyJ]

The larger your backup set, the more memory you'll need to scan and match clients against that backup set.

 

 

 

You can try recycling the backup set, starting a new backup set, adding more physical memory, or run the backup from OS X, which has much better memory management to deal with backing up OS X clients.

[archrenov8]

I had the same situation when I migrated my first client from OS 9 to Jaguar, Error 108.

 

 

 

In my architecture firm, we run eight clients off of our OS 9 server (a beige 266 G3 desktop).

 

 

 

Through some trial and error, I had to watch what was happening with the backup, and I realized that it was running out of memory when it was backing up the OS X mac, but not the others. It seems that in OS X, it may scan massive amounts of files searching for the enclosing paramters for backup (this is just my guess). At any rate, I had to increase the memory allocation for my OS 9 server to something like 45,000, AND I had to make sure that at the end of the day (since we are scheduled for 8:00 pm backups), that all other apps were quit on the server mac. That way, there was nothing else competing for that kind of RAM.

 

 

 

Seems to work fine now. I just wish the OS X client would shut down afterwards.

 

 

 

I suspect that you started encountering problems as the sheer number of files to be scanned on your Powerbook increased.

 

 

 

Glen Grayson

[BMan]

I'm getting the same not enough memory error (-108), but using OS X. With RAM in my TiBook maxxed out, I'm sure it's not a physical memory problem. I've tried to increase Retrospect's application memory allocation, but haven't found how to do that yet. Neither the application package nor the Retrospect application itself include the usual memory adjustment panel. Since neither the OS nor the application seem to be managing memory very well on their own, how can I manually increase memory for Retrospect in OS X? I'd really rather not be forced to resort to a recycle backup every time.

 

Thanks,

 

Dave