phlampe

Hello All ! Here's the story... that kept me awake for around 2 days... I have an XP SP 3 VM running under VMWare Fusion 6.0.2 on my Mac OS 10.9.2 Mac Pro (2008), and backed up by a Retrospect 7.7 SBS server. I've been using my VM daily for years, but it was giving signs of malfunctionning (freezes with a black screen after login in). I decided to rebuild it from scratch, by creating a new one with the same characteristics under VMWare Fusion, and then doing a bare metal restoration with the Retrospect 7.7 Rescue CD and my latest backup. It didn't work as intended. I was able to boot the VM from the Rescue CD iso, and got the first dialogs for the restoration. The problem was that the Emergency Recovery Wizard was unable to configure correctly the (virtual) network card: it kept assigning a localhost address (127.0.0.1) which is pretty much useless when you want to connect the Retro Client to the Server in order to restore everything. In fact, the option "Adjust drivers to support new hardware" shown on the documentation page http://www.retrospect.com/en/documentation/user_guide/win/disaster_recovery and that I linked here was missing: http://download.retrospect.com/docs/win/v8.0/user_guide/img/en/addendum_rug-17.jpg I remember doing a bare-metal recovery on a physical PC some years ago using the backup from my server over the network, and it had worked fine. Why isn't this working today anymore ? Is it because I was trying to do it on a VM ? Why is that "Adjust drivers..." option missing from the wizard ? I ended up recreating my VM anyway by first installing Win XP from the CD, then the Retrospect 7.7 client and then doing a full restore on it. After some tweaking around (notably because for some unknown reason the MBR of my VM was messed up, and I had to restore it with the CD console), I finally was able to use it normally. Thanks for your ideas, Paul-Henri

Hello All ! I have the same problems and questions as you guys. I'm running a Retrospect 7.7 SBS server with Open Files addon, backing up Windows XP, 7, Linux and Mac OS clients. Here are some points I can confirm: . these files are backed up only on Windows 7 systems, not XP . they are related to VSS, and are actually the shadow copies files themselves being made by VSS . I also have files ending with 04046e6cc752: I suppose it could be the ID of the software writer asking for the VSS (either Windows itself or Retrospect ?) If you want to have a look at the VSS files, follow what's in these articles: Controlling Shadow Copies in Vista (and Windows 7!) and Identifying how much disk space is used for restore points in Windows Vista The vssadmin command works on Windows 7 Pro just like in Vista. Now for my suppositions and questions: . I believe that the VSS files copied by Retrospect are the ones generated during the previous open files backup. For example, a backup made January 7th copied VSS files from Dec 19th and Jan 4th. Some of those files are big (over 5 Gb) and slow down the copy a lot because of the network time transfer involved. . one of my Windows 7 backup doesn't have any VSS files copied: why ? what should I check ? . my biggest question is if those files are needed by Retrospect in case of a full system restoration ? -> I don't think so, because it seems that the open files at the moment of the backup are copied correctly (outlook pst files for example), and all the VSS files existing in a backup image are older by several days in my case than the time of the backup itself -> I don't see in what use case would these intermediate VSS files be needed after a full restoration. Any ideas ? . as a side question, I'd like to better understand how thoses strings between { } are built. The second string seems a constant of {3808876b-c176-4e48-b7ae-04046e6cc752} (that's based on 2 of my Windows 7 Retrospect backups for 2 different computers). The end of the first string seems constant too: 5c260a4d3940 Hope this helps, and that some of you might have some ideas or answers, Best regards, Paul-Henri

Just happened to me too: yesterday, I found my trusty Retrospect asking for its licence code... In fact, it was the config77.dat file that got corrupted overnight. It was quite big (500 Mb) because of several failed backups with lots of errors on missing files during the last month. I followed the instructions here : Retrospect is asking me to re-type my license code and was able to restart Retrospect with all my scripts and planned executions etc... I also removed the big log entries from the history view. And then, I noticed that the backups of my server failed with a -645 error: I followed the instructions in this post, and everything looks well now: thanks a lot for the ideas ! I am using a Retrospect 7.7.620 running on Windows 2003 SBS. It might be a good idea to have a separate storage file for scripts and log entries... plz Retrospect devs :-) I also wonder what those files in the RtrSec.dir are for: what do they keep, and why do they grow up in time: the one I deleted was 1,3 Gb big ! Cheers, Paul-Henri

Thanks for your answer, Richy, but I'm not trying to restore to a running VM (I supposed this worked well with no glitch, but thanks to your post, it seems my assumption was ... wrong...) In fact, I'm asking about an equivalent tool or method to the VMWare vCenter Converter tool: http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ or to the one included with Ghost (beginning with version 14 I think) that can be run interactively (cf Ghost 15 function list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(software)#Norton_Ghost_15.0 ) It roughly allows you to generate a ready to boot VM disk image from Ghost's disk images, and you can do it offline, I mean have a job running on your server in off-peak hours and have the vm disk files sitting in your server waiting to be booted in case of a crash. So my question is if there's something equivalent that could do it from Retrospects images (rdf files, or logical disk images) and generate a VM disk, without having to do a manual restore on a running VM. Thanks for your help or any idea, Paul-Henri

Hello All ! I've been running happily Retrospect 7.6 on a Windows 2003 SBS server for some years now, and it's time to upgrade to 7.7 (because of some Win 7 clients popping up). I'm also in the process of setting up a VM Ware server in case my client computers fail miserably and would be unable to restart quickly because of hardware problems. My idea is to have a copy of those computers as virtual machines, ready to be started when needed. Is there a way, a tool, an utility that could generate a vm disk from Retrospects backup sets ? It would save time and end-user patience if I could use the backup sets this way instead of taking a new snapshot of the end-user computers with some P2V tool every day ? (I have another way of doing this, involving Ghost and some conversion tools from VMWare but it would be also redundant with Retrospect backups.) Thanks for your help, Paul-Henri

Hi Richy ! I've been using such a setup for over 2 years now, with a Synology NAS I have in a remote location. I wrote a script that scans continuously my rdb files and sends them over 2 ADSL lines whenever they change, using rsync over ssh as you want to do. It works very well, and as you said, Retrospect (I'm using RS 7.6 on a Windows 2003 SBS server) fills up files up to 600 Mb. The only times they get changed by Retrospect, is whenever you do an optimization of your backup set, and usually the old rdb files get cropped down, and rsync resends them. I see a real benefit to rsync's optimizations only whenever the link goes down, and that's when you're glad you don't have to resend those 595 Mb (worse case :-)) of data over the Internet. That's also a good reason to keep those files "small" and 600 Mb is a good compromise. So go ahead with rsync, Paul-Henri

It's lots of work to use Transfer, since I want to keep a complete restorable image of my disk, but remove only old versions of files backed up several times. Let's say I backup my system every weeks over 3 months (12 weeks): that's 12 backup sessions in the file, and let's say it became too big and I want to remove 1 month of backups (4 sessions). What I want is to remove only the older versions of the files that were backed up several times, in order to have complete images I can use for restoration. I cannot remove completely the 4 older sessions, since they hold the first base backup, and maybe files that were changed only once in the beginning. Using the filters to manually select and remove these old versions is virtually impossible over a whole system disk because there are way too many files to check individually, since you cannot select by backup session. That's what the feature in Retro 7.x does automatically. But you're right about Transfer: I checked it before posting, and it would have been ok if I had only some big files in my backup set to remove. Paul-Henri

Erf... Thanks for your answer Paul-Henri

Hello All ! I've been using Retrospect 6.1 for a while to backup my Macs to files stored on a NAS. Some of the backup sets have grown big over time, and I would like to trim them down without having to start a complete new backup set: in fact, I would like to keep only the last 1 or 2 months of backup in the file and remove everything else. Is there a way to do this in Retro 6.1 Mac, manually or by script ? I'm looking for something similar the Optimisation Policy feature existing in Retro 7.5 Windows. Thanks for your help, Paul-Henri

Hello All ! I just got Retrospect 7.5 Small Business Server (Premium edition) and installed it on a brand new Win 2003 SBS server. It works fine so far (I was able to create a backup to a NAS by using Windows file sharing protocol). I'm looking for the way to backup a workstation and write the files to an ftp server instead of directly to disk. This option exists in the Macintosh edition of Retrospect. Is it possible on the Windows version ? If it isn't, is there a reliable workaround ? Thanks for your help, Paul-Henri