Retrospect speed on OS X 10.4.10

On Oct 11, 2007, at 2:14 PM, Rowland & Wilma Carson wrote:

> I find that Retrospect has slowed down terribly
> under 10.4.10, compared with 10.3.9, and wonder
> if anyone else has observed this and found a
> remedy? I know other applications have been
> mentioned for backups recently, but my impression
> is that they don't have the same capabilities as
> Retrospect (in respect of automation, incremental
> backups, medium rotation, etc), so I'm not keen
> to abandon Retrospect.

It's been a long time since I used "speed" and "Retrospect" together--
I admit I didn't notice a slowdown at Tiger time, but I had already
been running it as a "start it and go do something else" program.

>
> I've not changed any of Retrospect's preferences
> (and have checked that they have not changed
> spontaneously). My recollection of Dantz support
> for problems in the early days of switching to OS
> X (after using it for many years trouble-free on
> System 7 & 8) is not of outstanding helpfulness;
> maybe they're better now. But I feel this may be
> something in the OS that needs to be addressed,
> rather than the application.

Don't worry about Dantz support. The program is with EMC now. (It's
OK to worry about EMC support.)

   --John

On 2007-10-12, at 10:14, Rowland & Wilma Carson wrote:

> I find that Retrospect has slowed down terribly
> under 10.4.10, compared with 10.3.9, and wonder
> if anyone else has observed this and found a
> remedy?

That's a big leap. I've been through every OS iteration and changed
machines during that, so can't help with comparing those 2.

I have noticed Retrospect slows down if one of its windows isn't
frontmost.

Other than that, you could try Activity Monitor to see if you're CPU
bound, and/or if there's lots of paging going on...

At 2:14 PM -0700 10/11/07, Rowland & Wilma Carson wrote:
>I find that Retrospect has slowed down terribly
>under 10.4.10, compared with 10.3.9, and wonder
>if anyone else has observed this and found a
>remedy?

Are you by chance using DVD-R for backup media? I found Retrospect much prefers DVD+R. I get 200 MB/minute performance with +R; -R was glacial.

And, I have to confess, I haven't done a backup since installing 10.4.10. I've got a Myth backend/frontend running now and never felt I had a window to run a backup at the same time. New mini should arrive tomorrow to dedicate to Myth!

Craig

>I know other applications have been
>mentioned for backups recently, but my impression
>is that they don't have the same capabilities as
>Retrospect (in respect of automation, incremental
>backups, medium rotation, etc), so I'm not keen
>to abandon Retrospect.

Well, unfortunately Retrospect has abandoned you, as well as all of
us who have been using it since the last millennia. It is a dead
product. From what I can see, very little, if ANY development work
has been done do the MacOS version in quite a long time, nor does it
appear that EMC has any interest in doing any in the future.

It was a fine product in its day. In fact I consider it to be the
gold standard of what a backup product SHOULD be, but its time has
past.

We still use it to backup older machines. In our environment people
still pay us to run older technology, so we continue to use older
technology until the revenue stops. But newer systems are backed up
by BRU or Comvault. Retrospect failed for us enough times on newer
systems that it can not be trusted any more.

I suggest you start looking for a replacement before you get burned.

--chuck
http://chuck.goolsbee.org

At 2:14 PM -0700 10/11/2007, Rowland & Wilma Carson wrote:

>--snip--
>Here's a couple of samples from the Retrospect
>log that illustrate the _much_ slower behaviour.
>
>First, under 10.3.9:
>
>+ Normal backup using all disc at 2007-10-04 06:00
> To backup set all disc BŠ
>
>- 2007-10-04 06:00:32: Copying PowerBook HDŠ
> 2007-10-04 06:22:14: Comparing PowerBook HDŠ
> 2007-10-04 06:23:05: Execution completed successfully.
> Completed: 296 files, 271.5 MB, with 12% compression
> Performance: 123.3 MB/minute (76.4 copy, 319.2 compare)
> Duration: 00:22:33 (00:18:09 idle/loading/preparing)
>
>Second, under 10.4.10:
>
>+ Normal backup using all disc at 2007-10-09 06:00
> To backup set all disc BŠ
>
>- 2007-10-09 06:00:52: Copying PowerBook HDŠ
> 2007-10-09 07:12:26: Comparing PowerBook HDŠ
> 2007-10-09 07:14:18: Execution completed successfully.
> Completed: 603 files, 187.7 MB, with 0% compression
> Performance: 30.5 MB/minute (18.0 copy, 100.5 compare)
> Duration: 01:13:26 (01:01:09 idle/loading/preparing)
>
Rowland:

A bit more information please?

What sort of drive are you copying to--DVD, USB1,
Firewire 400, Network drive, other?

Do you have plenty of free space on PowerBook HD
which I presume is your boot drive?

---------

Here are some totally different numbers--10.4.10,
G4 dual 1GHz, 1.5GB RAM, copying to eSATA drive
attached to eSATA port on Mac from an internal
SATA drive. Adaptor card limits to SATA 1 speed.

                Completed: 8933 files, 5.5 GB
                Performance: 619.2 MB/minute (536.7 copy, 731.7 compare)
                Duration: 00:18:33 (00:00:40 idle/loading/preparing)

This run was of a remote iMac over 100Mb wired
ethernet to same drive as above--

                Completed: 16004 files, 1.3 GB
                Performance: 73.6 MB/minute (42.2 copy, 287.7 compare)
                Duration: 00:34:50 (00:00:04 idle/loading/preparing)

--Jim

Rowland & Wilma Carson wrote:
> I just upgraded from OS X 10.3.9 to 10.4.10 - not
> because of any intrinsic attractions of the OS
> itself, but because I wanted to be able to run
> various applications that won't run on 10.3.9
> (such as the GUI version of Handbrake - the CLI
> version gave error messages too obscure for my
> comprehension).
>
> I find that Retrospect has slowed down terribly
> under 10.4.10, compared with 10.3.9, and wonder
> if anyone else has observed this and found a
> remedy?

There's a point where if you are scanning a huge number of files Retro will experience a huge drop in performance. I've seen it when the file counts get to 1,000,000 or more. I haven't seen it for file counts of under 300,000. Haven't tried to find the fall over point.

Note that this is total files on the volume being scanned, not the count of files to be backed up.

David Ross

David Ross wrote:
> Rowland & Wilma Carson wrote:
>> I just upgraded from OS X 10.3.9 to 10.4.10 - not
>> because of any intrinsic attractions of the OS
>> itself, but because I wanted to be able to run
>> various applications that won't run on 10.3.9
>> (such as the GUI version of Handbrake - the CLI
>> version gave error messages too obscure for my
>> comprehension).
>>
>> I find that Retrospect has slowed down terribly
>> under 10.4.10, compared with 10.3.9, and wonder
>> if anyone else has observed this and found a
>> remedy?
>
> There's a point where if you are scanning a huge number of files Retro
> will experience a huge drop in performance. I've seen it when the file
> counts get to 1,000,000 or more. I haven't seen it for file counts of
> under 300,000. Haven't tried to find the fall over point.
>
> Note that this is total files on the volume being scanned, not the count
> of files to be backed up.
>
Just to clarify. If you have a volume with 1.5 million files and a sub volume defined that has 20,000 files and are scanning the sub volume the number that counts is 20,000.

David

chuck goolsbee wrote:
> Well, unfortunately Retrospect has abandoned you, as well as all of
> us who have been using it since the last millennia. It is a dead
> product. From what I can see, very little, if ANY development work
> has been done do the MacOS version in quite a long time, nor does it
> appear that EMC has any interest in doing any in the future.
>
> It was a fine product in its day. In fact I consider it to be the
> gold standard of what a backup product SHOULD be, but its time has
> past.
>
> We still use it to backup older machines. In our environment people
> still pay us to run older technology, so we continue to use older
> technology until the revenue stops. But newer systems are backed up
> by BRU or Comvault. Retrospect failed for us enough times on newer
> systems that it can not be trusted any more.
>
> I suggest you start looking for a replacement before you get burned.
>
Every time I've looked at BRU there were two failings. One the GUI still seems to be not quite done. Plus it seems very difficult to have ask BRU to find all copies of file XYZ modified from Jan 06 to March 07, restore just these files somewhere, and let the user sift through them.

Now I know this is something you'd likely never do while wearing your ISP hat. :)

Most everywhere I have Retro installed users are responsible for day to day tape changing and can even do their own restores to get back munged files.

David

> Retrospect failed for us enough times on newer systems that it can
> not be trusted any more.
>

Can you provide a few more details on how Retrospect has failed, and
under what conditions? Currently, I'm relying on Retrospect for
backups of my home setup and in a small-business environment, and I'd
hate to realize I've lost data just when I need to restore a drive.

Thanks for your help!


Regards,

Jochen.


--
Jochen Wolters
jochenpolytropia.com | http://polytropia.com | jochenwolters (Skype)

Chuck Goolsbee wrote:

Well, unfortunately Retrospect has abandoned you, as well as all of us who have been using it since the last millennia. It is a dead product. From what I can see, very little, if ANY development work has been done do the MacOS version in quite a long time, nor does it appear that EMC has any interest in doing any in the future. It was a fine product in its day. In fact I consider it to be the gold standard of what a backup product SHOULD be, but its time has past. I suggest you start looking for a replacement before you get burned.

While I can fully respect the issues that Chuck has with using Retrrospect for the humungous number of files and servers that he is responsible for, I suspect (and hope!) that Retrospect can still be a serviceable and reasonably reliable program for backing up a much smaller office system.

Of late, I have followed the advice of Joe Kissell and have added an external drive to be a clone of the boot drive for each if the important computers in our network. This has allowed me to limit the the Retrospect Backups to the /Users and/Library folders.

When reading the Retrospect-talk list it is not hard to see that there are shortfalls in the ongoing maintenance and support of that software but I cannot yet agree to pitch out that 'baby with the bathwater.'

Certainly, there will need to be some hefty revamp of that software if it is to take advantage of Leopard's Time Machine features and incorporate them into a smart backup routine. I guess time will tell us soon enough whether or not that is going to happen.

Cheers,

John Wolff

Hamilton, New Zealand

>Certainly, there will need to be some hefty revamp of that software
>if it is to take advantage of Leopard's Time Machine features and
>incorporate them into a smart backup routine. I guess time will tell
>us soon enough whether or not that is going to happen.

There is a retail box of Retrospect (the most recent version) at the
Apple Store near my office, with one of those foil stickers on the
outside which proudly proclaims:

"Now Supports PANTHER"

(I have a cell-cam shot of that somewhere.)

Panther was released four years ago next week (October 24th, 2003).


Last time I spoke with a friend of mine who is ex-Dantz he said that
all the engineering talent who used to work on Restrospect are either
gone, or working on VMware.

I'm not holding my breath for a Retrospect update for Leopard.

--chuck

At 2007-10-12 06:13 -0700 Craig Treleaven wrote:

>At 2:14 PM -0700 10/11/07, Rowland & Wilma Carson wrote:
>>I find that Retrospect has slowed down terribly
>>under 10.4.10, compared with 10.3.9, and wonder
>>if anyone else has observed this and found a
>>remedy?
>
>Are you by chance using DVD-R for backup media

Craig - apologies for the delay in responding -
I've been occupied trying to get PHP, MySQL &
phpMyAdmin working again under 10.4, but that's a
different story!

No, I'm using DVD+RW for my removable discs, and
am using the same discs that were performng
happily under OS 10.3.9. As far as I can tell,
the only thing I've done is to upgrade the
operating system. But I have discovered through
Disk Utility that journalling is now turned on
for my internal boot disc, and perhaps that
change is slowing things down.

There seems to be no way to turn off journalling
except by re-formatting the disc; however, if the
OS X 10.4 installer was able to turn it on
without a re-format, surely it can be turned off
in some similar fashion - anyone know?

At 2007-10-14 03:40 -0700 Jim Carr wrote:

>What sort of drive are you copying to--DVD, USB1,
>Firewire 400, Network drive, other?
>
>Do you have plenty of free space on PowerBook HD
>which I presume is your boot drive?

Jim - I backup daily to both an external hard
disc and to a DVD+RW. The hard disc backup covers
the entire boot disc (and rotates between 2
backup sets); the DVD backup covers only my home
folder (and rotates beteeen 3 backup sets). Both
external drives are connected to the Ti PowerBook
G4 by Firewire 400. The PB disc is 60GB, of which
about 26-27GB was free before the OS update;
since 10.4 the free space is about 1GB lower at
25-26GB, not a big change.

I do a "media recycle" backup at intervals of
several weeks to prevent the backup file sizes
growing without limit.

I emphasize again that I haven't changed any of
my hardware, software or practices since the OS
upgrade.

At 2007-10-16 03:27 -0700 David Ross wrote:

>It sounds (lots of reading between the lines
>here) that you told Retro to use the external
>drives as if they were removable media. If so it
>also seems like Retro thinks the media is full
>and you need to put in new blank media. It also
>sounds like it didn't figure out the size of
>your removable media (which you don't really
>have) and made an assumption that's way too low.
>
>I think you should use the "File" option. You
>still have to deal with what to do when the
>external drive fills up but it is a LOT more
>obvious what's going on.

David - I do use the "file" option for the hard
disc backups - it certainly would not seem to
make sense to tell Retrospect that a HD was a
removable volume.

As mentioned above, my schedules have a "recycle
media" built in. For the HD, it's every 8 weeks,
separated by 4 weeks for each target file.

Here are 2 sample logs for the HD recycle backup, first under 10.3.9:



+ Recycle backup using all disc at 2007-09-16 02:00
        To backup set all disc BŠ
        2007-09-16 02:00:27: Recycle backup: The backup set was reset

- 2007-09-16 02:00:27: Copying PowerBook HDŠ
        2007-09-16 05:19:09: Comparing PowerBook HDŠ
        2007-09-16 08:11:23: 4 execution errors.
                Completed: 378143 files, 26.6 GB, with 27% compression
                Performance: 154.0 MB/minute (150.3 copy, 157.9 compare)
                Duration: 06:10:56 (00:17:45 idle/loading/preparing)

        Quit at 2007-09-16 08:12



And now under 10.4.10:



+ Recycle backup using all disc at 2007-10-14 00:05
        To backup set all disc AŠ
        2007-10-14 00:05:49: Recycle backup: The backup set was reset

- 2007-10-14 00:05:49: Copying PowerBook HDŠ
        2007-10-14 11:51:12: Comparing PowerBook HDŠ
        2007-10-14 18:19:35: 9 execution errors.
                Completed: 506467 files, 28.3 GB, with 29% compression
                Performance: 55.8 MB/minute (44.7 copy, 74.4 compare)
                Duration: 18:13:46 (00:58:15 idle/loading/preparing)

        Quit at 2007-10-14 19:14



Note the crippling increase in the time taken -
what was done in about 6 hours under 10.3 took
about 19 hours under 10.4! Didn't have much
up-time on the machine that day!

I take the point that there are quite a few more
files since the upgrade, but not proportionate to
the time increase, or the reported MB/minute
rates.

Thanks to those who suggested alternatives to
Retrospect, and the mention of a Retrospect talk
list was news to me too.

Bottom line - how can I turn off journalling
without a re-format of the volume? As far as I
can see, journalling offers me no advantages -
perhaps someone will correct me!

regards

Rowland
--
| Rowland Carson ... that's Rowland with a 'w' ...
| <rowlandcarsongooglemail.com> http://home.clara.net/rowil/

At 3:37 AM -0700 10/18/2007, chuck goolsbee wrote:

>>Certainly, there will need to be some hefty revamp of that software
>>if it is to take advantage of Leopard's Time Machine features and
>>incorporate them into a smart backup routine. I guess time will tell
>>us soon enough whether or not that is going to happen.
>
>There is a retail box of Retrospect (the most recent version) at the
>Apple Store near my office, with one of those foil stickers on the
>outside which proudly proclaims:
>
>"Now Supports PANTHER"
>
Chuck:

I'm guessing the Panther version isn't Intel native.

<http://www.emcinsignia.com/supportupdates/updates/#UPDATETYPE51>

Above is the latest list of updates. For Mac, it simply says "Use
these installers to update your 6.x version of Retrospect to the
latest version. This update is compatible with Mac OS 10.1.x and
higher."

They do support Vista in a professional edition for home and small
office but no mention of Leopard. Don't know if Leopard breaks it or
not but we will likely hear about it if it does. Perhaps they will
update client software if needed for Leopard but that is seldom
opened by users if IT folks have server setup to handle it.

New owners are focused on small and medium business server software
as far as I can tell. Maybe they don't see Leopard Server in that
market. They do support some 'nix servers. It shouldn't be all that
hard to port a 'nix version to run on an Intel Mac. Don't know how
user friendly that will be but Retrospect isn't famous for its
interface to begin with.

The majority of home users, if they backup, may stick with Time
Machine or something like SuperDuper. I have no idea what percentage
of Windows users think the provided Backup utility is good enough.

It takes a pretty good piece of software to get most users to pay to
replace what's already provided free. And it takes a market with
enough customers to make it worth the effort to market such a product.

Maybe storing backup data in a proprietary format isn't the best way
to go anymore.

--Jim
--

Jim Carr
jimcarrmac.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------

rowil wrote: "There seems to be no way to turn off journalling except by re-formatting the disc; however, if the OS X 10.4 installer was able to turn it on without a re-format, surely it can be turned off in some similar fashion - anyone know?"

Launch Disk Utility, select the journaled volume, and OPTION-click on File menu which activates Disable Journaling.

At 2007-10-20 05:47 -0700 baltwo wrote:

>Launch Disk Utility, select the journaled volume, and OPTION-click
>on File menu which activates Disable Journaling

baltwo - thanks - I should have thought of trying modifier keys!

regards

Rowland
--
| Rowland Carson ... that's Rowland with a 'w' ...
| <rowlandcarsongooglemail.com> http://home.clara.net/rowil/

I don't think journalling is the issue... it's Spotlight, a new feature added to 10.4 that was not present in 10.3.

I, too, am a long-term Retrospect user who was also late in switching from 10.3 to 10.4, and for similar reasons. I also needed to run a new app that wouldn't run on 10.3. But my transition was much earlier than yours. About 18 months ago, I think, so my recollection of exactly what happened may not be entirely correct.

I remember experiencing the problem you describe the first time I tried to backup the newly-installed 10.4 system -- Retrospect was taking 3-4 times as long to do a dump as before the upgrade. After banging my head on this problem for several days, I got lucky one night. The trick was to do as someone here suggested you do, namely to use "Activity Monitor" to look at CPU and disk activity while a dump was in progress. In my case, I ran Activity Monitor while Retrospect was doing a dump to one of my FireWire HDs.

The culprit turned out to be processes associated with Spotlight, which is apparently enabled on *all* R/W volumes by default. Spotlight was trying to index the external HD at the same time that Retrospect was building the dumpfile on it! The end result was that Spotlight was slowing everything down by both consuming huge numbers of machine cycles *and* by more than doubling the number of disk IOs.

My first attempt at a fix involved using the Privacy tab in the Spotlight system prefs pane to tell Spotlight *never* to index the external volumes that were used to hold dumpfiles. That seemed to work fine for a while. Then one night I noticed the dump again running unbelievably slowly, and I discovered that Spotlight was busily indexing the external dumpfile volume again. Apparently, Spotlight occasionally "forgets" the privacy settings on external devices.

Reports on this are conflicting... some users see it and some don't. In my case, it could have been something either I or Retrospect did inadvertently. Or perhaps one of the many system upgrades or security patches blew away the settings. Dunno. In any case, after it happened a few times, I decided that this wasn't going to be a viable, long-term solution for me. However, you may wish to try it, because it is the simplest and safest solution.

My next attempt involved visiting the command line (Terminal) and using the "mdutil" command to turn off Spotlight on a per-volume basis:

mdutil -i off /Volumes/NameOfYourExternalDumpfileVolume

You will either need to run this command as root, or to use an account that has admin privileges and can run "sudo". (If you don't understand what all that means, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing this at all.)

That worked fine until I forgot and reformatted my external drives, thereby blowing away the private, hidden directory in which Spotlight keeps its database and config files.

Ultimately, I decided that I really didn't use Spotlight very much, didn't really need it, and therefore could live without it. So I turned it off entirely by disabling it in "/etc/hostconfig". Rather draconian, I know, but it did fix the problem once and for all. Not that this tweak made Retrospect run fast, mind you, but at least thereafter it was no slower than it was before the upgrade to 10.4.

For those interested in further reading about Spotlight, the clearest and most comprehensive references I've been able to find are here...

<http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html> <http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/22/how-to-completely-disable-spotlight/>

The only remaining loose end concerns your DVD+RW dumps. I cannot see how either journalling or Spotlight can explain those data, because I wouldn't expect either feature to be enabled on a DVD filesystem by default. However, I do agree with a previous poster that DVD-R is *much* slower than DVD+R under Retrospect. I don't use DVD+RW very much, because I quickly decided that I couldn't abide the 2-3 times slower write performance compared with DVD+R. But then I always use DVD to make archival dumps, not incremental dumps, so minimizing the time required to make a dump has always been much more important to me than the few $$ I could save by using re-writable media.

You do say that you use DVD to backup your home directory. Perhaps the increased time can be explained by the need to save the access control lists (ACLs) as well as the files themselves. IIRC, this is another filesystem feature introduced in 10.4 that wasn't present in 10.3. Dump speed in Retrospect seems to be highly dependent on the number of files dumped as well as on the total dump size, such that a dump of a large number of small files will take *much* longer than a dump of a few large files, even if the total size of both dumps is the same. Since ACLs are small and numerous, this might be the reason for the slower DVD dumps under 10.4 as compared with 10.3.

David Allan Steffens

At 2007-10-22 07:00 -0700 das304 wrote:

>I don't think journalling is the issue... it's Spotlight, a new
>feature added to 10.4 that was not present in 10.3.

David - thanks for your very full and helpful posting. I had
(naively, it appears!) assumed that once Spotlight had finished its
session of thrashing the disc(s) just after I installed 10.4, it
wasn't imposing a big load on the system.

>I decided that I really didn't use Spotlight very much, didn't
>really need it, and therefore could live without it. So I turned it
>off entirely by disabling it in "/etc/hostconfig"

That sounds like the way to go for me. The Terminal holds no terrors
for me, I started using a CLI in the late 1960s. It would be nice,
though, if Apple would allow users to switch Spotlight off in the
System Prefs.

I've tried to use Spotlight a few times and it has not really shown
me useful information. EG several things showed up that could be what
I wanted, but it doesn't appear to display the context (ie the file
path, like the old-fashioned Finder Find) for the found items, so I
couldn't easily determine which was the one I wanted. I guess
Spotlight is good for people who throw stuff in a big heap, but I try
to keep my folders reasonably organised (can never quite manage to
hold it down to 10 items per level though ....), so it's no extra
help for me.

The Finder Find does seem to be very fast in 10.4, which makes me
think thaat it may be using the Spotlight indexing; I wonder if
turning off Spotlight will kill that too? No doubt the references you
quoted will throw light on that.

>For those interested in further reading about Spotlight, the
>clearest and most comprehensive references I've been able to find
>are here

I'll check those out before I do anything irrevocable. I can see
already that there are several hostconfig* files in /etc so I'll need
to be sure I'm doing surgery on the right one(s)!

>Since ACLs are small and numerous, this might be the reason for the
>slower DVD dumps under 10.4 as compared with 10.3

That sounds plausible. My own gut feeling, from watching the
Retrospect progress displays, is that speed is certainly not just
related to the total MB copied, and does seem to reduce when there
are many small files rather than a few big ones (which is pretty
obvious when you think about what's actually going on).

Thanks again for your kind help.

regards

Rowland
--
| Rowland Carson ... that's Rowland with a 'w' ...
| <rowlandcarsongooglemail.com> http://home.clara.net/rowil/

At 2007-10-22 07:00 -0700 das304 wrote:

>I don't think journalling is the issue... it's Spotlight

David - further to my previous reply - I don't
want to drag this thread out eternally, but just
wanted to report the latest (happy) observatiions.

When I first upgraded from 10.3.9 to 10.4.10 I
simply installed over the existing system.
However, that appeared to break a few things
connected with MySQL & PHP, and in trying to fix
them I eventually made an even bigger mess of the
whole thing!

So, I made a clone of the internal HD on an
external FireWire 400 volume, and erased the
internal disc with Disk Utility, then did a full
install of 10.4.10 on that (actually 10.4.6 from
the DVD followed by 10.4.10 combo updater).

I copied the Documents & Applications folders
back from the external disc in the Finder (some
applications needed to be re-installed instead of
just copied). I made (I hope) careful choices
about what other stuff (such as in the /Library &
~/Library folders) to copy the same way. I had to
log in as root and use the Terminal to restore my
MySQL databases and configure phpMyAdmin, but
that all went OK.

The bottom line at last - I started a recycle
media backup with Retrospect yesterday evening,
fully expecting it to take much of today to
finish (last try took about 19 hours) and was
amazed to find it done when I woke up this
morning. Here's the Retrospect log to compare
with what I posted before:


+ Recycle backup using all disc at 2007-10-27 23:21
        To backup set all disc BŠ
        2007-10-27 23:21:47: Recycle backup: The backup set was reset

- 2007-10-27 23:21:47: Copying PowerBook HDŠ
        2007-10-28 02:26:33: Comparing PowerBook HDŠ
        2007-10-28 05:43:35: 14 execution errors.
                Completed: 533679 files, 27.3 GB, with 28% compression
                Performance: 158.3 MB/minute (179.7 copy, 141.4 compare)
                Duration: 06:21:48 (00:29:45 idle/loading/preparing)

        Quit at 2007-10-28 05:45

Note that we turned off daylight saving time here
during the course of this backup which explains
the dispcrepancy between the start/stop & elapsed
times. As before I haven't included all the
reported comparison errors - source stuff getting
altered by unix during the course of the backup.

I have not turned off Spotlight (BTW I now see
how to make it display the item context - sorry
to be so slow!) and the internal HD is still
journaled, so I don't know why things are back to
normal again. Ah well ....

Thanks to all those who offered help, and
apologies for taking up so much space with this
(apparently) self-righting problem.

regards

Rowland
--
| Rowland Carson ... that's Rowland with a 'w' ...
| <rowlandcarsongooglemail.com> http://home.clara.net/rowil/