x509

True enough, but what else would the new CEO say? He's speaking to the (demoralized) employees and (discouraged) resellers as much as to the end users. Not to be a pessimist, but I place more stock in what the investors say or don't say. You can be sure the reporter asked this question and didn't get a clear answer back.

From this August 30th article: https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/news/366550297/StorCentric-winds-down-Nexsan-stands-out Serene is also offering Retrospect backup software, but that product's future is still yet to be determined, Shimmerman said.

Hi. I hope I'm not hijacking this thread. My normal Retrospect configuration is my desktop system plus 2 clients. At this moment, there is only one client, but the issue is the same. All systems are running Win 10 Pro 64, and are up to date with MS patches and annual major upgrades. The issue is that my client often reports a 505 - Client reserved error message, even a day or more after the last backup. @Lennart_T provides an explanation in the second message from this 2012 thread. So why is the Retrospect client still "busy" after 24 hours? Does the Retrospect server not signal the client that the backup script is done? No timeout? And why has this issue not been fixed by now? I've been set up an AI script for the client, in addition to the regular backup script, but the AI script doesn't seem to solve this issue. Rebooting that client isn't a practical option. It's frustrating enough that I'm thinking I should upgrade from V17 to V19, just to take advantage of the free tech support window, which is crazy. That all said, Retrospect has saved my butt enough times that I can't imagine going to any other backup solution. Happy New Year to everyone.

Hello everyone. It's been a hard few years, what with Covid, lockdowns, and just "life" and "stuff happening." Nothing to post, except that I'm happy to rejoin this forum. Does anyone know why the forum was offline part of last year?

I have the opposite problem. A low DPI laptop screen. A secondary monitor doesn't work. (Lenovo T series)

OK. Give me a few days to catch up on my "honey do" list and I'll install the update. I just red that article and it makes no sense at all to me, in terms of solving the root cause issue. (Yes, I can follow their instructions, but ... ) Also, it's an incredible kludge, the kind that a startup might publish as a quick fix for their entire customer base of 20 "key accounts." But Retrospect is hardly a startup, and presumably has thousands if not tens of thousands of customers. And they are in a mature business area with lots of hungry competitors. Since Robin said that this fix might not be available until early next year, it makes me suspect that Support and Engineering have a "failure to communicate" situation. If this fix does work, then it saves me the trouble of writing that letter to some director or VP of sales pointing out that the inability to do a Disaster Recovery on a boot volume might be detrimental to review. From existing customers who switch to another backup solution and stop paying support fees, or new customers who decide to go with a different solution.

Lennart, I believe that the only criterion should be to match the volume drive letter and name. Of course, the user should be warned about the consequences and be given a chance to cancel out. I guess it's a tradeoff. And there are bigger issues that I would want Retrospect to address first, notably the inability to recover a Windows boot volume.

Lennart, I agree with your point. Retrospect can't automatically recognize the new drive partition as the same the old one. I was trying to suggest to Retrospect that they give the user a change to configure the new volume to be the same as the old one.

I submitted a support case based on the fact that Retrospect detects a partition size change as a new drive. For me, that approach means extra work to recreate all subvolumes and to update all Storage Groups, since I organize my backups around storage groups. Each storage group has the same drive, e.g, \Photo\Catalog, from multiple systems. Here is Robin Mayoff's reply. I still think that Retrospect should give me the option to identify the "new' drive letter as the same as the "old" drive letter. -------- >all I did was resize a partition using Windows Administrative Tools, ON THE SAME DRIVE. When you change the partition size, Retrospect will think this is a different physical disk. Changing the size of a partition is a major change and partition size is an attribute used to identify one disk over another. The reason why Retrospect is very picky about this type of change is to protect users from dataloss during a possible restore operation. It would be a very bad situation if Retrospect wrote data to the wrong disk during a restore operation, so Retrospect uses many different criteria to identify disks so that the software can't accidentally overwrite the wrong drive during a potential restore.

The actual recovery instructions are at the top of this thread. Read bottom-to-top for a complete understanding of this issue. -- x509. Robin, Thank you for this workaround. It looks very helpful and complete. I am going to copy/paste these instructions into a Word doc for reference. When do you expect that the Retrospect fix will be released? Version 17.5x? 17.6? November 29, 2020 16:49 PM – Robin – Director, WW Support Dear ---, Retrospect Agent Reply can be found below. Agent Response: Our engineers did some research into this issue, as part of an upcoming bug fix they are working on. They came up with the following directions to correct the system after the restart fails to boot the computer after the restore: Boot from the Windows installation media, when at the Install Windows screen hit Shift+F10 to bring up a command prompt. Run diskpart, run list disk, if only one disk shows run, select disk 0. If there is more than one disk, they should be able to hopefully verify based on disk size. If it is not disk 0 they would replace 0 with the number of the drive. 1. Run, list par, to verify that there are 4 partitions, Recovery, System, Reserved, Primary. 2. Run, list vol, the volume number they want to use in the next step will have a FAT32 file system and should be 99MB with System under info. 3. Run, select vol, (number identified from step 4), i.e. select vol 3 4. Run, assign letter=z and should see "Diskpart successfully assigned the drive letter". Type exit 5. Run mkdir Z:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot 6. Run xcopy /s C:\Windows\Boot\EFI\*.* Z:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot 7. Run z: then run cd EFI\Microsoft\Boot 8. Run the following commands a. bcdedit /createstore BCD b. bcdedit /store BCD /create {bootmgr} /d “Windows Boot Manager” c. bcdedit /store BCD /create /d “My Windows 10” /application osloader (they can change My Windows 10 to anything they want) 9. The last command run will return a GUID, example {D91FE7C2-605F-4A2B-B035-80A7C30979BF}, they will need to use this guid in the next step 10. Run the following commands a. bcdedit /store BCD /set {bootmgr} default {your_guid} (your_guid will be the guid mentioned in step 9) b. bcdedit /store BCD /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi c. bcdedit /store BCD /set {bootmgr} displayorder {default} d. bcdedit /store BCD /set {default} device partition=c: e. bcdedit /store BCD /set {default} osdevice partition=c: f. bcdedit /store BCD /set {default} path \Windows\System32\winload.efi g. bcdedit /store BCD /set {default} systemroot \Windows h. exit 11. Reboot the machine. Please let us know if you have any additional questions, Robin Mayoff Director, WW Support Retrospect, Inc. ----------------------------------------- See your Case History for # 00076665 in your Customer Portal (sign in required): https://www.retrospect.com/support/case/5004U00000sShTs Verify your Support contract status: https://www.retrospect.com/upgrade?license=J376-4ZXD-E6HV-UTEZ ----------------------------------------- Additional Resources: * Knowledgebase - https://www.retrospect.com/kb * Forum - http://forums.retrospect.com * Training Videos - http://www.youtube.com/user/RetrospectInc ref:_00DU0Kyj8._5004UsShTs:ref November 28, 2020 01:58 AM I give up. and I'm very discouraged at this point. It would seem that volume restoration for Windows would be tested out extremely carefully before a release. I followed the instructions to first delete the entire contents of the target drive, and I still got the same error message list that I submitted previously. After playing around a bit, I tried to do a restore WITHOUT the system state. This restore failed because Retrospect refused to recognize the catalog file on a USB drive, even though it had recognized that same catalog file in previous restore attempts. What happened here??? Also, I had to to disconnect all my drives other than the ones directly involved in the restore because on two restore attempts, it _seemed_ that data on other drives got corrupted. As part of the setup for doing a restore, I was able to delete existing partitions, but not to actually reformat the drive. When I deleted partitions, my GPT formatted drive was converted to an MBR formatted drive, which would be a major pain to change back to GPT once Windows is installed. Another bug. Also, with every restore attempt, the existing Windows install was corrupted and would no longer boot, even for those operations that ended "incomplete." First I was re-installing Windows each time. Then I started to use Macrium Reflect Free to back up the existing install. All it does is partition backup and restore, but it does that quite well. After each failed restore operation, I had to restore that existing install with Macrium. I've spent way too much time on this issue, and it feels like I'm doing trouble-shooting for Retrospect. So when you do release fixes for these issues, then I will test them. I would be willing to be a beta tester for these features. My career was in software product management, so I'm very familiar with beta test programs, software quality assurance, etc. For a product suggestion, I suggest that the Restore Wizard work with drives other than C: November 28, 2020 01:58 AM , because WinPE assigns different letters to drives. I also suggest that Retrospect be able to do a volume restore to unused space on a drive, much as Microsoft does a Windows install to unused space. Please pass these suggestions along to engineering and the product manager. November 20, 2020 14:36 PM – Robin – Director, WW Support Dear ---, Retrospect Agent Reply can be found below. Agent Response: I asked my engineering team for feedback and they reported: It looks like this is the issue, X:\ProgramData\Retrospect\RtrExec.dir\Exec\State\ESP doesn't exist. The customer is sure that the system backed up was EFI? If so it sounds like they ran into this open bug, "Bug 9135 - RestoreESPData: statePath X:\ProgramData\Retrospect\RtrExec.dir\Exec\State\ESP doesn't exist, return kErrGeneric". The issue is that on some Windows 10 systems Retrospect gets a different error when attempting to check if the system is EFI that prevents Retrospect from backing the ESP. I am in the process of fixing this issue today but the fix is for backup and not restore Please let us know if you have any additional questions, Robin Mayoff Director, WW Support Retrospect, Inc. ----------------------------------------- See your Case History for # 00076665 in your Customer Portal (sign in required): https://www.retrospect.com/support/case/5004U00000sShTs Verify your Support contract status: https://www.retrospect.com/upgrade?license=J376-4ZXD-E6HV-UTEZ ----------------------------------------- Additional Resources: * Knowledgebase - https://www.retrospect.com/kb * Forum - http://forums.retrospect.com * Training Videos - http://www.youtube.com/user/RetrospectInc ref:_00DU0Kyj8._5004UsShTs:ref November 20, 2020 14:10 PM – Robin – Director, WW Support Dear ---, Retrospect Agent Reply can be found below. Agent Response: >I also tried to delete the Windows partitions and the various other partitions for a GPT drive. But I was unable to tell Retrospect to restore to unformatted space on the boot physical drive. What if I deleted the remaining partitions on that drive or tried to restore to a different SSD drive? When you boot from the recovery disk, you can use the menu option to configure drives. I typically suggest doing a complete disk reformat and then create one single partition for the entire disk. During the restore, the Microsoft ASR writer should automatically recreate the partitions to match what you had at the time of the backup. Please let us know if you have any additional questions, Robin Mayoff Director, WW Support Retrospect, Inc. ----------------------------------------- See your Case History for # 00076665 in your Customer Portal (sign in required): https://www.retrospect.com/support/case/5004U00000sShTs Verify your Support contract status: https://www.retrospect.com/upgrade?license=J376-4ZXD-E6HV-UTEZ ----------------------------------------- Additional Resources: * Knowledgebase - https://www.retrospect.com/kb * Forum - http://forums.retrospect.com * Training Videos - http://www.youtube.com/user/RetrospectInc ref:_00DU0Kyj8._5004UsShTs:ref November 20, 2020 06:30 AM Hi. I managed to figure how to get that snapshot you asked for. Attached. November 20, 2020 06:30 AM Attached 14.8 KB file: C drive backup option.PNG November 20, 2020 06:11 AM Costonel, I wasn't able to bring up a Properties menu item for the snapshot I wanted to restore from. I'm on Retrospect V17. I tried several different appraoches and once I selected a snapshot, Retrospect moved immediately to the next window in the restore process. Attached is a photo of the options I use when backing up the Windows volumes. I also tried to delete the Windows partitions and the various other partitions for a GPT drive. But I was unable to tell Retrospect to restore to unformatted space on the boot physical drive. What if I deleted the remaining partitions on that drive or tried to restore to a different SSD drive? November 20, 2020 06:11 AM Attached 13 KB file: C drive backup option.PNG November 19, 2020 10:11 AM – Retrospect – Attached 301 KB file: state win.jpg Dear ---, Retrospect Agent Reply can be found below. Agent Response: We assume your BIOS is set to UEFI if you have a GPT drive. When you selected the snapshot from which you restored, does the snapshot properties contain all the system state items like in the screenshot attached? Can you send us a photo of those items in your selected snapshot. Thank you for using Retrospect, Costinel The Retrospect Support Team --------------------------- Click the link below to update your support case. Note, the case is automatically closed if no response is received within 5 days). * Case # 00076665 - http://retrospect.com/support/case/5004U00000sShTs ref:_00DU0Kyj8._5004UsShTs:ref November 18, 2020 23:05 PM Unlike previous attempts, this time the restore operation did restore files as necessary, even though I didn't change anything about the way I tried to do the restore operatiion. However, there was one error, as noted in the Operations Log. As a result, the system would not reboot into Windows. The boot drive was so messed up that the BIOS prompted me to use a Boot Floppy. This time I did NOT get a message saying that the WinPE drive would be erased. For emergency purposes, any time I do any operations with the C: drive, I use a simple, but effective program that backs up and restores partitions, nothing more. It is called Macrium Reflect Free, and I don't consider it a replacement for Retrospect, but it does allow me to experiment safely, and recover from situations where Retrospect has somehow damaged the C: drive. November 18, 2020 23:05 PM Attached 78.1 KB file: Restore Operation 2020-11-18.zip November 17, 2020 12:02 PM – Retrospect – Dear ---, Thank you for contacting Retrospect support. Retrospect Agent Reply can be found below. Your Problem Description.: I can't get a Restore with System State to run to completion. The Restore operation starts but then terminates without actually restoring files. I disconnected all drives except my SSD (restore target), the HDD with the backup set sessions and a USB drive that has the the Retrospect catalog of backups. In addition, the WinPE Disaster Recovery USB stick is attached. Also, I got an odd message that the WinPE drive would be completely erased, just before the restore operation terminated. I don't understand why that would happen, since I clearly set up the restore to go to the SSD drive. Do you want me to upload some photos that I took with my phone? I really need to get this system restore done. My system runs Windows 10 Pro 64, version 20H2. It is homebuilt with AMD 3900X CPU/ASUS ROG X570 Strix-E motherboard, with 32 GB of RAM. The system has been running 100% stable for six months. The SSD is set up for UEFI/GPT format. Agent Response: We apologize for the inconvenience. The message about erasing WinPE is a cosmetic BUG you can ignore it. we assume you Restore locally Please provide us the log file to check it Reproduce the Restore locally to your SSD then Go to Reports>Operations Log and open the log file Go to File menu and select Export and export the log to your backup drive. You can zip it on your main computer and send it to us. Thank you for using Retrospect. Costinel The Retrospect Support Team Additional Resources: Have you tried our online self-service tools? * Knowledgebase - http://retrospect.com/kb * Forum - http://forums.retrospect.com * Training Videos - http://www.youtube.com/user/RetrospectInc/featured?hl=en ----------------------------------------- Click the link below to update your support case. (Note, the case is automatically closed if no response is received within 5 days). * Case # 00076665 - http://retrospect.com/support/case/5004U00000sShTs ------------------------------------------ ref:_00DU0Kyj8._5004UsShTs:ref November 17, 2020 04:52 AM I can't get a Restore with System State to run to completion. The Restore operation starts but then terminates without actually restoring files. I disconnected all drives except my SSD (restore target), the HDD with the backup set sessions and a USB drive that has the the Retrospect catalog of backups. In addition, the WinPE Disaster Recovery USB stick is attached. Also, I got an odd message that the WinPE drive would be completely erased, just before the restore operation terminated. I don't understand why that would happen, since I clearly set up the restore to go to the SSD drive. Do you want me to upload some photos that I took with my phone? I really need to get this system restore done. My system runs Windows 10 Pro 64, version 20H2. It is homebuilt with AMD 3900X CPU/ASUS ROG X570 Strix-E motherboard, with 32 GB of RAM. The system has been running 100% stable for six months. The SSD is set up for UEFI/GPT format.

So I submitted a case to Retrospect, and I was somewhat gobsmacked to read that I got tripped up by a known bug, for which a fix is being developed. You could assume that for a company that sells backup software, including disaster recovery, that the disaster recovery would actually work. But you could also be wrong, as I have learned. 😲 I'm going to start a new thread, so that anyone else with this problem can easily locate the fix, which Robin Mayoff did provide.

David, I went back to my installation logs and I did not use Minitool PW on the C drive or any of the GPT hidden partitions. I used PW only on D (DATA) and other partitiions installed in the remaining space on the 1 TB SSD drive after the C Windows partition was created. I deliberately created a C partition much larger than I would need for now, so that I would likely not have to touch that partition for years.

David, Your point about Minitool Partition Wizard is valid. I can only say that stupid-simple Macrium Reflect Free has no issues working with partitions that have been resized with PW. I have never tried to do a Disaster Recovery before (well, actually I did but that was a disaster ...) but I decided that I needed to implement that process after my desktop system got hit with really nasty malware, the kind that can't be remedied with confidence, short of wiping Windows and starting all over. It's discouraging to read your comment about Engineering. That said, there seems to be just one support technician assigned to my case, and his responses are good. He asked me to do a screenshot based on the attributes of my backup snapshot, per this picture. HOWEVER .... I can't seem to get to a Properties window for the selected snapshot, and just replied to that effect to the support technician. Just for grins, I tried to restore after deleting the C partition and the related Windows "hidden" partitions for a GPT boot drive. No joy there. Retrospect couldn't simply restore to empty space on the physical boot drive. I did not try to reformat the entire drive first, or to restore to a different SSD. At this point, I've given up trying to restore my November 1 backup. But I still want to get this procedure nailed down for the next time. And there will always be a "next time." You may think I'm "determined" but I'm also frustrated and annoyed right now.

David, Yes, I can be determined. That has been very important to me over the years. I did file a support case. https://www.retrospect.com/support/case/5004U00000sShTs. I didn't say a word to Retro support about Minitool Partition Wizard (PW). PW does its work and leaves no fingerprints. If you inspected my entire system, drives C-G, and then M-Q, you could not tell that I was using PW. Drive letter assignments can equally be done with the Control Panel Administrative Tools. In my support case, I did disclose the use of Macrium Reflect, but only to explain how I get my system working again after the Restore failed. Retro support asked for my operations log, and provided helpful instructions for how to save off that log. Unlike previous attempts to restore, this one actually seemed to work, with files being copied to the C drive. Just one eensy-weensy little problem. "System State" could not be restored, and that generated hundreds of lines of error messages. And then when I tried to reboot, the boot drive was so badly trashed that my system BIOS prompted me to enter a "boot floppy." I am not making this up. When did you last buy or even use a system with a floppy drive? I don't know if Windows 7 even supported floppy drives. I can't buy a motherboard today with a floppy drive cable connector. Waste of good gold-plated pins and board real estate. After I did a C drive restore with Macrium Reflect, my system was able boot up again with no problem. Since I just bought Retro 17, I'm within my 30 day support period. And if I don't get a good response from the front-line support guy, then I will definitely escalate the issue. Thanks to my career in software product management, I know how to write an escalation email. As for Retrospect and Macrium Reflect, as they used to say, "flames to /dev/null."

UPDATE: In my system configuration, the NMVe SSD derive contains my C drive, Windows + programs and D drive, which contains all my user data. The Retrospect catalog is normally contained on D, but I moved it to a USB drive before attempting another restore including system state. This time I got this very unexpected message: And then the restore terminated early (again ...) WinPE is my Retrospect Disaster Recovery USB stick. Why would that be wiped? I clearly selected Drive D on Disk 1 as my restore target. Is there any hope for getting this restore to work right? I'm going to do a bug report with Retrospect support right away.