SilverKeeper scheduled backups suddenly failing

In article , Erik
Richard Sørensen wrote:

> Hei....
>
> Curmudgeon wrote:
> > G4 Digital Audio (466 MHz w/1.0 GB RAM) running 10.4.11 and SK 1.1.4:
> >
> > I have been running SilverKeeper as a secondary backup solution for a
> > number of years and have always been fully satisfied . . . until now.
> >
> > All of a sudden, my scheduled backups are failing. I have the backups
> > for all four of my "drives" (three partitions on one HD and one data-
> > dedicated unpartitioned HD) scheduled to run at 3:45 a.m. nightly, and
> > they've run like clockwork until recently.
>
> Well, I don't use SK for scheduling backups, but I noticed that even a
> manual backup suddenly stopped after updating to 10.4.11 on my
> QuickSilver, so I had to clean all prefs, cache and archived log files.
> Here I use MainMenu 1.7.2. After cleaning I haven't observed any
> problems with SK, - except that it won't make the Leopard disk bootable
> on the QS - only the Tiger disk....

Well, I took your implied advice and deleted everything associated with
SilverKeeper that I could find: Prefs, plist, logs, and crashlogs, then
redefined my backup sets (again) and did a manual run, so all is well at
the moment. I will have to see whether the scheduled jobs run tonight
before I will know whether it was all in vain. And by the way, I am not
trying for "bootability" since I use SuperDuper! to maintain a separate
bootable partition.

> > The only change I've made was to move SK from one partition to another
> > since I wanted it on the boot drive. I fully reinstalled it, wiped the
> > preferences clean, and redefined the same backup strategy and schedule
> > that had been working properly. Manual initiation works fine, but the
> > scheduled initiations simply don't run.
>
> Hm, - maybe you should not have deleted the prefs files...

Yep, perhaps you're right, but I did so only after the scheduled backups
began to fail.

> Formerly I've used the Synchronize! Pro X, but it is getting too
> expensive to upgrade, and my version doesn't work well in scheduled mode
> with neither 10.4.11 nor 10.5.1, but manually it still works.... So
> something could lead to think that SK doesn't work all too stable with
> 10.4.11, if it is installed directly oto an existing 10.4.11, but can
> work, if fx. installed in a 10.4.9 or 10.4.10, which afterwards then is
> updated to 10.4.11....

I had 10.4.11 installed long before the failures began, so I don't think
it's a matter of the two not playing well together in the same sandbox.

> > The only idea I've come up with is to wipe the target drive (LaCie d2
> > 250 GB) clean and rebuild the backup sets from scratch, but that seems
> > an unnecessary step since the manual backups continue to work.
>
> This shouldn't be necessary...

Agreed. Just a wild goose chase . . .

> > Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
>
> No real ideas - except starting it manually and then let it do it's job...

Been there, done that. I'm glad that continues to work, but I miss the
reassurance that comes with automatic nightly backups.

Thanks for trying to help. I'll let you know whether it runs tonight.

Cheers!

Mudge
 >> Stay informed about: SilverKeeper scheduled backups suddenly failing 

In article ,
Curmudgeon wrote:

> All -
>
> G4 Digital Audio (466 MHz w/1.0 GB RAM) running 10.4.11 and SK 1.1.4:
>
> I have been running SilverKeeper as a secondary backup solution for a
> number of years and have always been fully satisfied . . . until now.
>
> All of a sudden, my scheduled backups are failing. I have the backups
> for all four of my "drives" (three partitions on one HD and one data-
> dedicated unpartitioned HD) scheduled to run at 3:45 a.m. nightly, and
> they've run like clockwork until recently.
>
> The only change I've made was to move SK from one partition to another
> since I wanted it on the boot drive. I fully reinstalled it, wiped the
> preferences clean, and redefined the same backup strategy and schedule
> that had been working properly. Manual initiation works fine, but the
> scheduled initiations simply don't run.
>
> The only idea I've come up with is to wipe the target drive (LaCie d2
> 250 GB) clean and rebuild the backup sets from scratch, but that seems
> an unnecessary step since the manual backups continue to work.
>
> Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

I don't know SilverKeeper, but for other backup products I have used,
when a backup fails consistently, the first point of failure I look at
is the source hard drive, not the drive used to store the backed up
data. Does SilverKeeper maintain a log file? If so, what errors are in
it? What about the Mac OS X console? Does it show any error messages?
 >> Stay informed about: SilverKeeper scheduled backups suddenly failing 

In article , Shawn
Hirn wrote:

> In article ,
> Curmudgeon wrote:
>
> > All -
> >
> > G4 Digital Audio (466 MHz w/1.0 GB RAM) running 10.4.11 and SK 1.1.4:
> >
> > I have been running SilverKeeper as a secondary backup solution for a
> > number of years and have always been fully satisfied . . . until now.
> >
> > All of a sudden, my scheduled backups are failing. I have the backups
> > for all four of my "drives" (three partitions on one HD and one data-
> > dedicated unpartitioned HD) scheduled to run at 3:45 a.m. nightly, and
> > they've run like clockwork until recently.
> >
> > The only change I've made was to move SK from one partition to another
> > since I wanted it on the boot drive. I fully reinstalled it, wiped the
> > preferences clean, and redefined the same backup strategy and schedule
> > that had been working properly. Manual initiation works fine, but the
> > scheduled initiations simply don't run.
> >
> > The only idea I've come up with is to wipe the target drive (LaCie d2
> > 250 GB) clean and rebuild the backup sets from scratch, but that seems
> > an unnecessary step since the manual backups continue to work.
> >
> > Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
>
> I don't know SilverKeeper, but for other backup products I have used,
> when a backup fails consistently, the first point of failure I look at
> is the source hard drive, not the drive used to store the backed up
> data. Does SilverKeeper maintain a log file? If so, what errors are in
> it? What about the Mac OS X console? Does it show any error messages?

I guess I wasn't clear. It isn't that I can't perform proper backups
with SilverKeeper. Running it manually works just fine: No errors, no
crashes. However, the backups I've scheduled to run unattended never
fire up. I've removed all of the prefs, plists, logs, etc. associated
with SilverKeeper, but last night's scheduled 3:45 a.m. run was again
a no-go.

There's nothing wrong with any of the drives: This is a software issue
and has nothing to do with hardware failures as far as I can tell. I
have just removed all of the SilverKeeper stuff again as well as every
analagous file I could find with "lacie" in the title (which I'd left
undisturbed last time), so we'll see whether that pays any dividends.

These backups used to run like clockwork and I've made no significant
changes to my software environment ever since the iTunes and QuickTime
updates a few weeks back (quite a while before the failures began).

I'm stumped . . .

Cheers!

Mudge
 >> Stay informed about: SilverKeeper scheduled backups suddenly failing 

In article , Curmudgeon
wrote:

> G4 Digital Audio (466 MHz w/1.0 GB RAM) running 10.4.11 and SK 1.1.4:
>
> I have been running SilverKeeper as a secondary backup solution for a
> number of years and have always been fully satisfied . . . until now.
>
> All of a sudden, my scheduled backups are failing. I have the backups
> for all four of my "drives" (three partitions on one HD and one data-
> dedicated unpartitioned HD) scheduled to run at 3:45 a.m. nightly, and
> they've run like clockwork until recently.
>
> The only change I've made was to move SK from one partition to another
> since I wanted it on the boot drive. I fully reinstalled it, wiped the
> preferences clean, and redefined the same backup strategy and schedule
> that had been working properly. Manual initiation works fine, but the
> scheduled initiations simply don't run.
>
> The only idea I've come up with is to wipe the target drive (LaCie d2
> 250 GB) clean and rebuild the backup sets from scratch, but that seems
> an unnecessary step since the manual backups continue to work.
>
> Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Quick update . . .

I sent the above message to LaCie SilverKeeper support and received an
incredibly expedient and detailed response which essentially told me to
do exactly what I had already done (with a couple of machine restarts
mixed in). I followed the instructions to the letter and still haven't
solved the problem. It is appearing to me as if there may be an issue
between 10.4.11 and SilverKeeper 1.1.4 since I remembered that I had to
reapply the 10.4.11 combo update not long ago to fix an unrelated issue
and it may well be that my scheduled backups ceased at that time. (I
wish I knew for sure, but my old SK log files are long gone.) Someone
here had suggested that SK worked OK as long as the 10.4.11 update was
applied "on top of" 10.4.10 but might have issues with a fresh install,
and the application of the combo update may somehow have simulated
that.

Dunno . . .

If anybody else has any further ideas, I'd sure like to hear them.

Cheers!

Mudge

--
---
"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?"
 >> Stay informed about: SilverKeeper scheduled backups suddenly failing 

In article , Curmudgeon
wrote:

> In article , Curmudgeon
> wrote:
>
> > G4 Digital Audio (466 MHz w/1.0 GB RAM) running 10.4.11 and SK 1.1.4:
> >
> > I have been running SilverKeeper as a secondary backup solution for a
> > number of years and have always been fully satisfied . . . until now.
> >
> > All of a sudden, my scheduled backups are failing. I have the backups
> > for all four of my "drives" (three partitions on one HD and one data-
> > dedicated unpartitioned HD) scheduled to run at 3:45 a.m. nightly, and
> > they've run like clockwork until recently.
> >
> > The only change I've made was to move SK from one partition to another
> > since I wanted it on the boot drive. I fully reinstalled it, wiped the
> > preferences clean, and redefined the same backup strategy and schedule
> > that had been working properly. Manual initiation works fine, but the
> > scheduled initiations simply don't run.
> >
> > The only idea I've come up with is to wipe the target drive (LaCie d2
> > 250 GB) clean and rebuild the backup sets from scratch, but that seems
> > an unnecessary step since the manual backups continue to work.
> >
> > Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
>
> Quick update . . .
>
> I sent the above message to LaCie SilverKeeper support and received an
> incredibly expedient and detailed response which essentially told me to
> do exactly what I had already done (with a couple of machine restarts
> mixed in). I followed the instructions to the letter and still haven't
> solved the problem. It is appearing to me as if there may be an issue
> between 10.4.11 and SilverKeeper 1.1.4 since I remembered that I had to
> reapply the 10.4.11 combo update not long ago to fix an unrelated issue
> and it may well be that my scheduled backups ceased at that time. (I
> wish I knew for sure, but my old SK log files are long gone.) Someone
> here had suggested that SK worked OK as long as the 10.4.11 update was
> applied "on top of" 10.4.10 but might have issues with a fresh install,
> and the application of the combo update may somehow have simulated
> that.
>
> Dunno . . .
>
> If anybody else has any further ideas, I'd sure like to hear them.

Well, having failed to solve the problem directly, it occurred to me
that a cronjob would suffice as a substitute, so I set up a tab that
tickles the LaCie Backup Support application at 3:45 every morning.

All is well, even if I am still mystified about why SilverKeeper was
working as scheduled one day and not the next.

Cheers!

Mudge

--
"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?"
 >> Stay informed about: SilverKeeper scheduled backups suddenly failing