Backup Failed under Leopard

DEVONthink Tips
1

Doing my not-frequent-enough backup of DTPO. I usually run the Export>Backup Archive script to create a zip file, then burn the zip to a DVD.

(I’ve had bad luck burning the .dtBase package to a disk, which is why I do it this way.)

So this is my first time backing up under Leopard. Unfortunately, while the script was trundling away in the background (it takes a LONG time), I got a warning from whatever was in the foreground that “Your startup disk is almost out of space.”

Oops. (Bill, before you tell me to buy another terabyte, I’m on a laptop with 160 gigs. Hard to get more than that yet in a laptop drive.)

So I deleted some stuff, but DTPO popped up a dialog box saying “Backup Archive failed.”

Well, I can understand that, so I quit DTPO, deleted the zip file it was trying to create, emptied the trash, launched DTPO again, ran the Export>Backup script… “Backup failed.”

(Just for grins, I restarted… same result.)

Any suggestions? I searched the forums and found references to “rebuilding the database”… should that be my next step? What are the drawbacks (other than time) of rebuilding?

Thanks!

2

Hi, Stephen. My MacBook Pro has a 100 GB drive. :slight_smile:

I’m a packrat. But I can move stuff off the MBP that I rarely need onto my Power Mac G5 (1.5 TB storage space). And I’ve got a (cheap) 500 GB drive handling Time Machine backups for my MBP. So I keep over 25 GB free space on the MBP drive.

Suggestion; go to http://www.devon-technologies.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5386&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight= and download the public beta of a Leopard-compatible revision of your application.

I’ve been working for days with the previous beta of DT Pro Office 1.3.4 and haven’t encountered any problems in my workflow.

A caution about disk space: Apple engineers recommend keeping 15 to 20% as free disk space to allow for Virtual Memory swap files and other temporary space needed by the system and applications. If one runs out of disk space it’s possible for the system to start overwriting. That could have been the reason for your error message.

When Backup Archive runs, it will need enough space to produce a copy of the verified and optimized database, then compress it.