fatmav Posted April 22, 2003 Report Share Posted April 22, 2003 I am backing up to a file backup set on a firewire harddisk. For some reason, Retrospect rewrites the whole rbf file when it shuts down. (To replicate this scenario, all I need to do is to start Retrospect and shut it down, with nothing done in between.) I get the impression that Retrospect is rewriting the whole rbf file from the amount of I/O write shown in the Windows task manager. While it's writing to the rbf file, there is also a rfb.rfc file, which will disappear after the whole rewrite. I also notice that the rbf file's size may go down each time this lengthy rewrite takes place. The problem is, this process takes an hour! (The rbf file is 18GB.) Any hint why this is happening at all? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted April 22, 2003 Report Share Posted April 22, 2003 If you forget the backup set from Configure>backup Sets, does the same thing happen? Which Windows system version? What does the operations log indicate when this happens? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatmav Posted April 23, 2003 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2003 I just "forgot" the backup set and open it again. The rewrite happened. But I noticed another interesting pattern. See if this matters. But let me answer your other questions first: this machine is a windows xp sp1 laptop, and there is nothing special in the log when this rewrite happens. All I see from the log is "Launched at [time]" and "Quit at [time]". Back to my observation. Since this is my laptop, in the day I unplug the firewire drive and bring it to work. What I noticed is that the rewrite will not happen twice in a row if the drive stays connected in between. But if I disconnect the drive and plug it in again, then opening Retrospect and closing it immediately will trigger the one-hour rewrite. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted April 23, 2003 Report Share Posted April 23, 2003 What happens if you turn off the "system restore" feature inside Windows XP for all drives? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatmav Posted April 23, 2003 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2003 Ah, after I turned off System Restore on the Firewire drive (which contains the file backup set), this rewrite problem seems to be gone! I still see it writing a ~100MB .rfb.rfc file when Retrospecting is quitting, but the .rfb file remains untouched (at least for now). Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatmav Posted April 26, 2003 Author Report Share Posted April 26, 2003 I just want to write a follow-up on this issue since it seems several others have a similar problem with the long wait during Retrospect exit. Last time I reported that the problem has gone away after I turned off the System Restore on the firewire drive that I used to store my file backup set. It's true, but there is a catch. Every time I reboot my laptop with the firewire drive unplugged, for some reason, Windows XP decides to reenable the System Restore on the drive when it is replugged into the laptop. And if I am not careful and start Retrospect before turning it off first, the same problem comes back... I am not willing to take this hassle, so I figured that I can try other options and now I am experimenting to use a disk backup set instead of a file backup set. So far (2 days), Retrospect has been happy even with System Restore turned on and there is practically no difference in using a disk backup set and a file backup set on the firewire drive (except they have different file organization on the drive). If all goes well, I think I will just keep using a disk backup set instead. I also note that using a disk backup set has the advantage of being able to efficiently take a backup set off-site, since a disk backup set is made up of many ~600MB .rdb files that fit on CDRW's very well. (A file backup set seems to give me one huge .rfb file, but perhaps you can configure it to do something else. I don't know.) Hope this could be useful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted May 2, 2003 Report Share Posted May 2, 2003 To be notified when this issue has been resolved, please join this mailing list. http://list.dantz.com/mailman/listinfo/xp_system_restore Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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