Silverkeeper

 

Troubleshooting Hints:

Some users of SilverKeeper report problems with installation that are likely due to one or more of the following:

  • If you are experiencing Error -1712, you are likely using Tiger and an incompatible version of SilverKeeper; make sure you have updated to the current version of SilverKeeper.
  • corrupted system volume or application volume; manually perform Disk First Aid before running Installer to make sure your disk is OK. When running OS X, best to boot from OS X Install CD, and use Apple Disk Utility to apply First Aid to both your normal boot drive as well as to your external drive.
  • corrupted OS X; use Apple Disk Utility to Repair Permissions on your boot volume.
  • OS X users should Repair Permissions before and after installation of any application or system update using Apple Disk Utility.
  • OS is corrupt; though your system may seem to be running OK, it is possible that your system has several corrupted files preventing proper installation or running of SilverKeeper. A clean install of your system will likely resolve the issue.
  • under OS 9 and X, User must have permission to install applications, or permission to write to System folder for Prefs, Help, and/or Extensions. User must have full read/write permissions to install successfully. When running OS X, your user account may be restricted.
  • if upgrading from OS 9 to OS X, be sure to check your source and destination disks with First Aid. Also, be sure to reinstall SilverKeeper for OS X after upgrading to OS X. You will also want your destination drive to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (also known as HFS+)
  • If you are having trouble after upgrading to OS X, you may want to delete the existing SilverKeeper preferences files

    "com.LaCie.SilverKeeper.plist" and

    "SilverKeeper Prefs"

    and redefine your settings.


Some users have reported problems when writing to external FireWire hard drives:
  • If your drive requires vendor-specific drivers, be sure they are up-to-date. Under OS X and OS 9.1 or later, we recommend using Apple's FireWire drivers.
  • Be sure to run First Aid on your source and destination drives to be sure all is OK. With OS X, this means you must boot from your Install CD, and run Disk Utility from the Installer Menu (10.3.x and earlier), or the Utilities Menu (10.4)
  • verify that your drive can tolerate large file copies, as well as copying of thousands of files. Some FireWire drives do not behave well, especially if other FireWire peripherals are also connected at the same time. Placing your Backup drive on a dedicated FireWire port with no other peripherals attached to that chain may improve things.

Some users have reported problems when writing to network volumes. This area has many variables, depending on what software and/or OS is used to make server volumes available. Very few problems have been reported by users using AppleShare, except that max file size is 2GB. Other problems have been provided by users using SMB, WEBDAV, Linux, and PC based server volumes:
  • The source folder/drive may not be a mounted server volume; it should be the boot volume, or a folder within the boot volume. It may also be an additional drive directly connected to your computer.
  • it may not be possible to set creation/modification times/dates on the destination to be identical to times/dates of the source files. Some servers alter time slightly; some by exactly an hour due to differences on how time zones and daylight savings time is tracked. SilverKeeper makes some intelligent choices here to permit some leeway.
  • PC server volumes create many extra files, usually beginning with a "." to keep track of the metadata information of Macintosh files. Some Synchronize and/or Restore operations may copy these extra files back to your Macintosh source. These files consume additional space, but may be hidden by the Mac OS.
  • Permissions info may not be preserved to network volumes (PC format)

Be careful with volume format on your external drives.

Ideally, your external drive should be formatted as Mac OS Extended. This format is required if you wish to make a system or complete drive backup. Also make sure that "Ignore ownership on this volume" is NOT set for external drives used with OS X; this is also called "Ignore permissions" in previous versions of OS X.

Some users format their external hard drives using the PC's FAT32 format so the drive can be used on both PC and Macintosh computers. Microsoft has recently recommended that you limit FAT32 volumes to sizes of 32GB or less. So if you have a hard drive larger than 32GB, you should partition your drive into multiple 32GB or less FAT32 partitions. When using the drive with your Macintosh, OS 9 and OS X will only reliably access the first FAT32 partition.

Permissions info is not preserved when writing to PC formatted volumes (FAT32).

There are limitations as to supported character sets for folder and file names. You may not use any of the following characters if you intend to copy files/folders to a FAT32 formatted drive:

? [ ] / \ = + < > ; : " , | *

If you try, you may end up with an error -43

Microsoft recommends using NTFS for larger volumes, but OS 9 cannot mount NTFS volumes. Only OS X 10.3.x and 10.4.x can mount NTFS volumes, but they can only be mounted as read-only.

There are Windows utilities to permit mounting Mac OS Extended (also known as HFS+) volumes under Windows. Please refer to http://www.macwindows.com for further information. LaCie recommends MacDrive from http://www.mediafour.com.

SilverKeeper does not directly support CD-R/RW or DVD-R/RW drives. Apple's Disc Burning support will permit limited support of up to 700MB backups for CD-R media and 4.7GB for DVD-R media.

Note well: SilverKeeper will not divide Backups into multiple disc images. You will be limited to the size of the destination drive.


Finally, be sure to check www.silverkeeper.com website for latest information.
 

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