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Backup to an external FireWire Drive E-mail
Written by Doug Willen   
Thursday, 30 September 2004
Backup to an external FW drive with Retrospect is problematic when attempted in an unattended mode with 10.3.x unless the following information is applied. Backup to an external FireWire hard drive with Retrospect.

Unattended backup to file on an external drive was a problem for us, since under 10.3.4 external FireWire drives unmount themselves when all users have logged out. Fortunately, Dantz documents a solution on their support site:

http://www.dantz.com/en/support/kbase.dtml?id=28154


When backing up to a file backup set on an external hard drive under Mac OS X 10.3, users may notice an error -43 (file/folder not found) referring to the backup set catalog when the backup is run during a time when all users are logged out. This problem occurs because mac os X 10.3 unmounts all non-boot, non-ide drives when no users are logged in.

The following unsupported workaround will cause Mac OS X to not unmount the volumes. As root, create the following file:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist

The file should contain the following:
(don't include the "----8----" lines)

----8----
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>
</dict>
</plist>
----8----


Then, reboot the system. Volumes should now stay mounted regardless of whether a user is logged in.