ANKulin

Okay. But will that not eliminate all my scripts and such? I am in the middle of putting together a new build that I will be replacing my existing PC with. Basically my two most important drives (with about 100K photos saved) will be physically transferred to the new computer. My other drives with data (documents, music, videos, etc.) I will be temporarily connecting to new PC and copying over to new NVMe drives on the new PC. My last full back-ups are from April 12th (for reasons due to the software stopping back-ups) and I was hoping just to do a quick update backup to get them to today's date and start moving stuff over onto the new PC. The existing PC is going to be retired from its role in a few days so I think I will at this point just install Retrospect on that PC. I will have to check how licensing works. Hopefully it is a simple matter like with other software where I can disable/uninstall/unlicense the software on my existing PC and just re-enable the license on the new PC.

Restarting did not change the situation. Immediately after restarting, I ran Task Manager and there is an instance of Retrospect 19.1 running. But no icon or such in the task bar and way for me to access the program, i.e., bring it up on screen. It was set up to run on start up, but is not showing up in my list of Start Up applications, unless the mysteriously named application called "From=autorun" is Retrospect. So I go to the start menu and run Retrospect 19.1 and the software loads up on screen, but as you can see, does not allow me to schedule / start executions. But checking task manager shows two instances of the software running! If I shut down the second one, the Retrospect version I see shuts down. So I think the key is to somehow get into the instance that seems to magically turn on during start up. But how? I am so frustrated with this software. Have never had much luck at all with it getting it to do what I want it to do.

The attaches snip shows the problem. This box is greyed out on all tabs and cannot be unchecked. I cannot seem to do any backups. What needs to be done to make this box checkable so I can uncheck it?

Two of the 4TB drives are from 2019 and have never been used (WD Reds), the other 4 drives are about 6 years old (WD My Books). Thank you for the advice about incremental backup, I have unchecked that function as well as the groom function which I will do manually every so often. I do have a question about proactive scripts. The one I have set up so far is set as "Always Active - Allow automatic execution anytime" but it does not want to start until midnight in spite of there having been no previous backup made. I would have expected this would run at anytime (as implied) in the background. I got fed up, and changed it to a scheduled time of 10:25 PM (I did this at 10:20 PM and wanted to see if something would happen), and it started up, but terminated at midnight. It did the same thing the next day. What am I missing here? Shouldn't the backup be running now (I have changed it back to Always Active) since the backup is not complete?

Drives currently at: E: Data - 0.6TB Used X: Photos 1 (up to 2018) - 2.9TB used - but other than occasional editing of older images, not actively adding new photos to this drive Y: Photos 2 (2019 +) - 1.7TB Used - but adding new images as time goes on. Understood about using a fewer larger drives for back-ups but I have the drives I mentioned from the past and not looking to spend money on more drives at this time as I have these other spare drives available. Is my basic understanding in my original post how to set this up correct? Should I also have Retrospect compress files on the back-up drives? I believe I saw that an option somewhere. Thanks

HI. I have purchased Retrospect 18 (Solo) for keeping back ups of my photos and documents. I am not an IT professional and probably over thinking this and so very unsure of what I need to do to set this up efficiently for what I want to do. I have attached a simple sketch that will hopefully aid in understanding what I have and what I would like to do. Basically I have three SSDs or HDDs on my home PC that I wish to keep backed up. One 2TB SSD contains date (documents, spreadsheets, etc.), while two 4TB HDDs hold my photo collections. I have 6 HDDs (2 x 2TB, 4x4TB) that I will be using as backup destinations. At any one time three of these HDDs will be at home and the other three will be stored at our cabin located about 200 km from home. I plan to swap these drives on a roughly monthly basis taking the three back-up drives home up to the cabin on a Friday and returning back with the other three drives on the Sunday and connecting these to my Home PC. These would be one month out of date and so I would expect retrospect to update them and bring them up to speed. I want to set this up so that other than me physically disconnecting and reconnecting these drives to my PC that all of the backing up is carried out automatically without any user intervention in the software. I believe I want to do pro-active backups that backup daily while the three backup HDDs are connected the PC and set up incrementally so that only changes to files are backed up. And I would like it to be set up so that when my back-up HDDs become full, that Retrospect just overwrites older back-up data on the disc and does not ask me for a new disc. Otherwise I would just reformat the backup HDD and live with redoing a full initial backup on the disc. From what I have gathered in my stumbling around so far in the software is that it looks like I will end up with six back-up sets and six scripts (one for each back-up set). I am finding the process confusing because of my lack of familiarity with all the jargon and so I am suffering from analysis paralysis so to speak (like I said before, overthinking this). ! could use some help in setting this up. Is it basically: Clicking Proactive AI Backup under the Backup and create New + name it Source - Select disc on Home PC to be backed up Destination - create new backup set choose disk, give it a Backup Set Name and choose destinations disc unclick create as storage group??? choose backup security level keep only last 10 backups Use default catalogue file destination and finish Select - All files Options backup every day block level incremental backup on thorough verification on back up open files Schedule - always active And repeat the process a total of six times. Thanks in advance.

What I meant was if I change the backup set I have to a proactive one can I then continue backing that up to the same portable drive right away and everything will be fine? From what I can see I will have to start the proactive script from scratch. There does not seem to be an option when editing teh current scripts to turn proactive on or off. And I worry that I might not 100% copy down the same parameters when I initiate a pro-active script. Thanks

Lennart: If I change the back-up to a pro-active script willit be able to carry on with the back-up data currently on the portable drive as-is,or do I need to basically wipe the drive and start over with it? Thanks

I am a home user and would like some advice on improving my back-up startegy. I am currently running Retrospect 9.5, I have not yet updated to version 10 yet. I currently have some 80,000 image files (photos) on a 4TB HDD (WD Red NAS). This I call my X: drive. I have personal fiules and stuff on an SSD which I call my D: drive. I back each of these up onto separate back-up drives. My back-up drives consist of: 2 x 4TB WD Mybooks, used to back-up the photos 2 x 2TB WD Mybooks, used to back-up the other files Back-up Strategy: I keep a pair (2TB + 4TB) of drives connected to the computer. Back-ups are scheduled daily mid-evening the second pair of drives are stored off-site at my office once a month a move the pairs of drives from home --> office and vice versa. The drives from the office are one month out of date and so they would be brought back up to date automaitcally on the first evening back home. I have assigned different drive letters to each back-up drive:Q:(photos) <-- 4TB R:(photos) <-- 4TB S:(data) <-- 2TB T:(data) <-- 2TB I have set up 4 automated scripts in Retrospect: Data --> S and, Data --> T (which ar e identical except for naming the destination drive) Photos --> Q and, Photos --> R (which are identical except for naming the destination drive) I have attached JPEGs that show how the back-ups have been set up. (I have noticed doing this that they are not nearly as identical as I thought they were, the data back-up has a few less options selceted) Problem: There is a problem however that I have noted and that is that the automated scripts stop and wait (w/o notification) when they get to a script to do the back-up for any of the drives that are off-site and not connected to the computer. This means that the drives that are connected do not get backed up until I manually abort the back-ups that are waiting for the missing drives. I think I would be in better shape if I named both sets of drives identiacally. So 2 x 4TB drives named Q:(Photos) and 2 x 2TB drives named T:(Data). And then remove the two redundant scripts which should result in Retrospect scripts not waiting for off-site drive drives to apear, and thus keeping my daily back-ups running on-schedule without my manual intervention. But is this do-able (advisable may be the better word) in Retrospect and in a manner that won't cause issues to the software or my back-ups? Also if there are any obvious ways to improve what I am doing I would like to hear about them, bearing in mind that I am in no way involved in IT and therefore mostly ignorant in all the jargon. So please keep it simple for me. Thanks,

The corruption on the first two times was the disks were corrupted and totally unreadable by Windows (I tried reading each disk individually with no luck). Also those instances appear to also be related to BSOD and sudden shutdowns. The corruption noted last night by Retrospect during the incremental back-up identified corrupt file structures and unreadable data for a number of random subdirectories,none of which were used or edited in any way last night. There was no BSOD last night. Files I worked on I believe were fine though when I first backed them up I received 8 warnings about comparisons not matching up (I re-ran the backup and received no warnings for those 8 files). Regarding the RAID enclosure it is not showing any errors or warnings. And yes the board is overclocked, has been since putting together the rig, 2 or 3 years ago.

I am thinking the same thing as I recovered the data a second time and now am seeing corrupted directories on the drives again as I was backing up some edits I made this evening. The hard drives are maybe 6 months old (WD Red NAS Drives). I have 2x4TB unitis set up in a RAID 1 Array in a Mediasonic ProRaid 4 bay Raid Enclosure connected via e-Sata. On the first corrupt, I did not have all my photos back-up (the drives contain only photos) and so I bought a 3rd 4TB so that I could go back and work on one of the originally corrupted drives at my leisure, see if I could recover the missing files. So if it is a hardware problem, it was either one of the two 6-month old hard drives (and I picked the wrong one to keep in the RAID array, or the RAID enclosure itself. At this point I am probably going to buy another new drive 4 TB drive, and try to set up those the two newest drives as a RAID 1 array using my motherboard RAID chipsets (ASUS X79 Deluxe Mobo). I will have to open up my box and see if I have enough free SATA ports left and also figgure out how to set up the drives as RAID drives.

I just restored a corrupted hard drive over the weekend, after reformating the drive, and restoring from my Retrosect backup. I was in the process of making a second backup copy of my data drive onto another backup drive when something happened again and my data drive is corrupted and unreadable. Sigh. I suspect it is related to some BSODs that have just started occuring in the past 10 days at random, though this evening there was no BSOD before the drive became re-corrupted (but there had been one during the night as the second back-up wasunderway). So I will have to reformat and restore the drive again. My question this time is as follows. Can I make a simple copy of my full back-up drive onto the second back-up drive? (by simple, using something like Windows Explorer to copy contents from one drive to the other). I have however assigned the drives with different drive letters (Q and R) so does this lead to problems with Retrospect later as I set up identical scripts for the Q and R drives as I figured I'd get confused with two portable Q-drives (one drive stays on-site, the other is stored off-site and every month I switch them around - I am a home user). Or do I use this snapshot method? I am unclear if it makes a 100% duplicate copy or does something different (again a home user here, not fluent in all the IT terminology related to backups). Given the issues currently being experienced by my main PC, I'd want to do this copying using a different computer, being worried any future BSOD corrupts my one good back-up drave, after which time I lose everything. I only have retrospect loaded on my Main PC by the way. I hope that is clear.. Thanks in advance for the advice,

Thank you - that helped. Andrew

Personal user here who bought the product to have backups of my external hard drives with all my photographs stored on them (80,000 +/-). The drive became corrupted and so I had to reformat the drive and restored my back-up files overnight and into the early morning. Before leaving for the office (~ 7AM), I checked in on the progress and the ETA for completion was another 1:45 min (so ~ 8:45 AM). On return home, restore had completed and I checked the logs. At 8:50 AM there were tow errors reported: Can't Access volume Photos X: - error 1102 (drive mising/unavailable) Script "Backup X-->Q" incomplete Running version 9.5.3.103 (Desktop version) as ver. 10 update came while we were on vacation and so I havenot yet upgraded I have noticed that some photographs from the last couple of subdirectories seem to be missing on my restored drive (the subdirectories are present, but empty of contents). I am in oporcee of checking other subdirectories to see if anything else may be missing too. My question is - Is there a way to get Retrospect to restart the recovery so that it only checks for and adds back any missing files to my photos hard-drive, or do I need to start over from the beginning again and hope everyhting transfers over again without error? Thanks Andrew