[FX.php List] [Off] Not a valid path - for scheduled backups

[Troy Meyers]

This is a really old thread, and I could never solve it 'til now ...it's sort of solved, so I'm reporting.

The problem was the inability to specify a FireWire-connect external drive as a backup drive for FMS. It seemed like it should be possible, and I tried all kinds of suggestions given to me here in this forum, and none ever got it to work it always showed the backup paths as "Not a valid path".

My original posting is pasted way below.

Since many tried to help, I thought I should post what the solution was, such as it is. It might also be revealing a bug in both FMS8A (where the problem originally occurred) and now FMS9A, where it was solved after a fashion.

Here's how it was solved.... I can now use the FireWire drive connected to the Mac Mini Intel for backup using FMS9A.

There may be a bug in FileMaker Server that makes this difficult, but it is possible and it is working for me.

>From the fmforums.com Server Forums, the member "Corn" helped, he used a technology similar to VNC to remotely check things on the Mini running FMS9A. First he verified that I had set the permissions correctly on the external FireWire drive, and apparently I had. Then he used Terminal to more carefully check to make sure what was being shown in Get Info was really true -- it was.

Then he tried putting in a backup path in the FileMaker Server Admin Console. He had the same problem as I did - the path comes up as "Not a valid path".

Then he solved it simply by stopping Web Publishing, then stopping Database Server, and then starting Database Server and Web Publishing again, all this done using FileMaker Server Admin Console.

Once that was done, clicking the Validate button in any of the path specification boxes now brought "Valid path" as the status, and looking at the files produced in the backup folders confirms that actual backups were done.

HOWEVER, restarting the machine apparently brings the problem back. The paths again become "not valid" and the manual stopping and starting of the server using Admin Console must again be done to make the paths appear valid.

Doesn't this seem like a bug in Server? Surely you should be able to restart the machine and not have to go through this....

What would the best way to report this to FileMaker Inc?

-Troy




Original question from 8/8/2007:
To my great shock I just discovered that my FMS8A backup schedules haven't been being executed since 5/27/07... I know, I should have been checking. I thought I was doing OK having Retrospect backup the backups to DVD. Not if there weren't new backups.

What is odd is that the backup file path now says "Not a valid path" in the schedule setup but did originally say "Valid path" and used to work. I don't know what changed on 5/27/07 but I guess something did.

My backup drive is an external hard drive, FireWire connected. I thought it made sense to have the backups on an external.

At some time I thought I heard someone mention not being able to backup to an external drive... I thought I was misunderstanding, and thought I knew that it was working for me, so I glossed over that.

Is that the problem - the drive being external? How is having to use the startup drive good as a backup if the startup crashes?

I set up a new temporary (I hope) schedule to backup to the startup drive, but since ideally I do 14 non-overwriting backups a week, I don't have enough space there.

Any suggestions?

Does FMS9A also have this limitation?

-Troy