Troubleshooting Retrospect 5.x: Tape Drive writing problem and solution

A number of Retrospect 5.0 users have experienced repeated "error 102" messages (trouble communicating) when backing up to tape drives from various manufacturers.

MacFixIt reader Greg Gaich writes "Inital troubleshooting (including endlessly fiddling with the SCSI chain) never fixed error. Everything had always been fine with Retrospect 4.3, so I was not that suspicious of hardware.

"Although I had always enabled hardware compression on all my backup sets (under both 4.3 and 5.0) I tried creating a new backup set with the simplest possible number of options, including turning off hardware compression. Bingo! I've been backing up my home network flawlessly since then. I'm not sure exactly why it was not a problem with 4.3, but I suspect hardware compression may have had some problems compressing certain files, or perhaps just took longer than 5.0 was willing to wait."

So if you are having difficulties with your particular third-party tape drive, try reducing Retrospect to its most basic backup routine.

You choose to enable or disable hardware compression on a set by set basis, when you create the backup set (there is a checkbox, default on, that tells Retrospect to use hardware compression if it is available).

Retrospect's documentation (perhaps incorrectly) states: "If your device does not support hardware compression, leaving the checkbox set does no harm. If you choose to encrypt your backup set, Retrospect disables hardware compression, as encrypted data does not compress well."

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