Firewire connection lost with Exabyte VXA-2 using Retrospect

[Josh Hurd]

I have an Exabyte VXA-2 Packet-loader with FireWire
I am using RetroSpect Server v6.0178 device access v1.0.104
Running on an xServe G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.8

When I attempt a backup all is good until the connection to the tape drive is lost. Nothing short of a system reboot and tape drive power cycle will bring it back. Retrospect hangs and is unresponsive and must be Force Quit. Restarting Retrospect reveals NO devices are connected.

This only happens on the xServe where I want it to eventually live. I also have a PowerMac G5 tower I have been using with no problems. Well no problems after I re-installed OS X on that machine.

This has been an issue since day one on several machine with several FireWire cords.

Has anyone had any similar experiences with this sort of set up?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Josh

[MDhaliwal]

I haven’t used either product in conjunction, but what does the folks at Dantz/EMC have to say about this?

Have you tried any other software solutions? If you experience similar symptoms on a different machine, with the same setup, or even better, with a different backup software piece, you can better evaluate which part is actually failing.

As I understand, Retrospect using a constant query of the hardware to keep its connection live to the tape device you have. In contrast, BRU only queries the device when it’s necessary to do so. If you ever tested BRU on that machine, these two opposite ways of handling hardware will battle each other.

You say that the tape device works without issue on a PowerMac G5, which is leading me to believe that its not a problem with your hardware, tape at least. Though OS X doesn’t have built in tape drivers, are you able to see the the device in the System Profiler when this issue occurs? I can see my FC tape library listed under SCSI on my backup server, so I would think you should be able to see yours under FireWire. If you can see it there, but not in Retrospect, it’s probably a Retrospect issue. Of course, if you can’t in either, it could simply be that Retrospect has locked up the device and it has gone offline, which I’ve seen happen with other solutions.

[tbone]

I had lots of issues with the VXA-1 SCSCI losing connections with Retrospect. The drive frequently lost communication while running and the only way to go ahead was to reboot both the computer and the tape drive. The VXA finally died.

[MDhaliwal]

[QUOTE BY= tbone] The VXA finally died.[/QUOTE]

Wow, that was the feel good ending of the year, huh?

Though the hardware died, were you ever able to tell if it was Retrospect improperly using your hardware or just bad hardware?

[tbone]

Well it had disconnect issues with 2 different units over several years and several versions of Retrospect. It got the job done for a few years but some days you’d come in and backups wouldn’t have ran b/c comm. was lost for no apparent reason.

Trent

[Anonymous]

I’ve got the Exabyte VXA-2 hooked up to my Mac G5 running 10.3 Server. The FIRST one died after many firewire ‘bus’ issues. Exabyte told me there were some known issues with the G5 firewire bus and their unit. They sent out a replacement. This just died too…
‘Internal Power supply problems’

I’m really upset that I bought this POS, apple sales/engineer recommended this as our backup solution. It’s been nothing but a headache…

[heavyboots]

I’ve got an AttoTech U4LS scsi card and a Quantum SDLT 320 running with various revs of Retrospect 6 (avoid Retrospect 5 like the Plague!). It has been very, very stable for over a year now. Perhaps 5 random hangs that whole time (with nightly BUs Mon thru Fri year-round and approx 400gb fully verified backups at the beginning of each month). The couple times it has randomly hung, I’ve gone and hunted up the latest Atto scsi drivers and it has been fine again after an update. One sure-fire hang for a while was inserting a fresh tape that was “bad”. Retrospect wouldn’t stop with a bad tape message, it would just hang at the tape request dialog. I complained in their forums several times (and even verified I wasn’t along because I solved the problem for someone else with similar issues) to no avail. Not sure if that’s still an issue in the most recent Retrospect 6 or not as I exchanged the bad tape in the end…

One other thing I noticed–a Granite Digital external firewire case wouldn’t EVER verify correctly via Retrospect. This was around Dec. of last year, so they may have hacked their firewire drivers to better operation by now, but I highly suspect the Retrospect firewire drivers were the culprit. I could Finder-copy the same data and do diffs and it would be fine. I could even restore from the drive that claimed it had verify errors and do diffs it would be fine. Retrospect, however, was always under the impression Something Bad had happened during the verify stage…

NOTE: One reason I posted this is that I suffered with an Exabyte Mammoth 2 drive for YEARS (must have exchanged 5 or 6 of those units!). As a result, I wouldn’t touch Exabyte product again with a 10-ft pole.

[dvsjr]

I have an Exabyte VXA-2 autoloader 1U firewire connected to an Xserve G4. I had these exact same issues with it as well, I took some server admin list advice (also called Dantz) and updated the firmware of the exabyte drive, updated the Retrospect software and also the driver and I havent had issues since. (Knock Wood)

[foilpan]

A couple of my clients have the VXA2 1×10 firewire 800 autoloader and have had tons of problems since installation.

I just had one sent back after it wouldn’t even get past the post stage of booting. Great…

On a related note, does anyone know how to set the robot to SCSI control mode so BRU can actually control the thing? I’m tired of Retrospect’s unreliability and have used BRU with good results in trials. It just complains about this RMA unit’s not being in SCSI control mode since I unpacked the thing.

In the future, I’m avoiding Exabyte like the plague. 😥

[Anonymous]

I am having problems with my Exabyte VXA2 as well. 6 months old and having I/O issues and continue to get failed or bad backups. I went with the solution because the client insisted. Looks like we will get my way after all. Sending it back and buying an Idealstor. I have this installed at a few clients. Disks like tape as offsite. Pretty cool. http://www.idealstor.com if interested.

[zodieman]

I’ve given up totally on Retrospect all but for the simplest of environments where I can have a dedicated person babysit that damn thing 😉

We’re totally hip on BRU now. I’ve several clients with Xserves with the new Exabyte VXA-172 loader (SCSI) with BRU as the backup program and they’re rock solid. Never a hiccup and they work like a charm. More than I can say about Retrospect in the same config… However considering the costs of external drives now and the capacities going up all the time it can be hard to justify tape backups in some cases. I have several redundant backup schemes now involving pure D2D backups using UNIX scripts and rsync as a backup server.

Trev Page
Senior System Engineer
GraphicCARE Solutions
http://www.graphiccare.ca

[Author]

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