"Exhausted resources" syndrome

[arnstein]

Occasionally, a backup job will silently fail part way through. When I look at the Windows event log, I see various messages that point to some sort of operating system resource that is exhausted. For example, from last night, these two messages in the SYSTEM log:

 

Code:

---

7/28/2003 3:32:26 AM 2 0 1001 SAVRT N/A OWL

System memory is running very low. Norton AntiVirus Auto-Protect may not be able

to function properly.

7/28/2003 3:32:48 AM 1 0 8007 BROWSER N/A OWL

The browser was unable to update the service status bits. The data is the error

.

---

 

Afterwards, I can't log in to the computer, and CTRL/ALT/DELETE does not work.

 

This is a Dell Pentium 4 system, Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, 512 MBytes of memory. Retrospect 6.5 Professional, latest version downloaded from Dantz web site. In this case, the backup destination was a (disk) file. I have seen this failure mode when backing up to a VXA-1 SCSI tape drive.

 

Apart from actually solving this problem, I would like to verify that the backup set is still valid. Is there a diagnostic that I can run on the backup set to see if it is OK? Due to the nature of progressive backup, I'm concerned that I'll be adding sessions to this backup set for a few more weeks, only to discover that the entire set is unusable because of the failure last night.

 

 

[natew]

David,

 

Your best bet is probably a ram upgrade - especially if you need to run Norton Auto-protect during the backup. It is recommended that you keep closed as many other programs as possible during the backup. The auto-protect feature is particularly CPU/RAM intensive during a backup so you may want to disable it if you can.

 

Chances are your backup set is fine. You can run a verify operation from the tools menu. That will read through the entire set and make sure the catalog file and data match up. Any files that don't match will be backed up again in the next proactive backup.

 

Every time retrospect does a backup the files in the set are matched with what is on the disk. If there are any discrepancies the file is backed up again. In other words-you should be fine.

 

If you are really concerned you can try some test restores, use a new backup set or turn off matching for one round of backups.

 

Nate

[arnstein]

Hello Nate,

 

Thank you for your help on this.

Quote:

---

natew said:

Your best bet is probably a ram upgrade - especially if you need to run Norton Auto-protect during the backup. It is recommended that you keep closed as many other programs as possible during the backup. The auto-protect feature is particularly CPU/RAM intensive during a backup so you may want to disable it if you can.

 

---

I need to understand this. Are you saying that Norton's auto-protect feature increases its memory usage during a backup? If so, I'll try to disable it during backup. Is there a particular Windows "service" that I can attack? Are there other services that I should shut down during a backup?

 

I've created a recurring task that prints out the three biggest core hog processes every 10 minutes. This should be enlightening.

[natew]

Hi

 

Yes, that should be interesting indeed.

 

From the get go Retrospect moves around a really large amount of data during a backup. If autoprotect tries to scan/monitor/protect/whatever all of that data the computer can slow to a crawl.

 

There aren't any other services in particular that you should shut down. If you have any raid optimization or disk scanning software running it is best to turn it off during the backup.

 

Nate

 

[awnews]

You could also just turn off Auto-Protect completely (although Norton keeps trying to turn it back on, e.g. after full scans). I have it turned off and just rely on incoming & outgoing email scans and scans of downloaded files (NAV scan initiated by my download manager after a file download).