Tape Drive Not Seen by Retrospect

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If you are using Retrospect 8.x or later for Macintosh and Retrospect is no longer seeing your tape drive or tape library, you can try to reset the storage devices inside of Retrospect. For some users this process will allow Retrospect to see the tape drive again under the Storage Devices screen.

Before doing the steps below, verify that your tape drive shows up in Apple System Profile. If the System Profile can not see the tape drive, Retrospect will not be able to access your device.

1. Go to System Preferences and stop the Retrospect Engine.
2. Go to Macintosh Hard Disk > Library Folder > Application Support folder > Retrospect folder.
3. Open the retro.ini file using TextEdit.
4. Add the following:
5. [Devices]

ClearAllDevices=1

1. Save the changes to the file
2. Start the Retrospect Engine
3. Launch the Retrospect Console and go to Storage Devices. Retrospect should now be able to see your tape drive, although your tapes will display as "unknown" and bar codes will need to be re-scanned.

After you have completed this process, you can return to the Retro.ini file and remove the ClearAllDevices=1 line or change the value to 0.

If the above steps do not help to display the tape drive, you may want to try and stop the engine and remove the configxx.dat and configxx.bak file from the Macintosh Hard Disk > Library Folder > Application Support folder > Retrospect folder after stopping the Retrospect engine. When you start the engine again a new set of config files will be created. If the tape drive displays after doing this, then your old config file was corrupted.

Last Update: June 28, 2012