watershed

I have tried to speak to someone in EMC Retrospect Technical Support about this (on the European phone number: +33 1 46 95 87 78) but just get put on hold listening to the same Sales CRM message for 20+ minutes. No sense of if I am in a queue or how long I will have to wait -- and it's the same if I choose the Sales channel! Is anybody there at EMC? It's galling to have to listen to a recorded message of how wonderful Retrospect is when, at this point, it appears to have failed me and I just want some advice.

I have Retrospect Desktop 6.1 running on Mac OS X 10.4.11, backing up to a dedicated LaCie D2 150 Gb external Firewire drive. The drive has 2 partitions, one for the Retrospect Catalog and one for the Retrospect Data. This setup has worked well for me and I have successfully retrieved data from it in the past but I now have a problem: after hard disk failure I need to retrieve data from my backup and can't... I have a complete backup that Retrospect logged as successful and the Retrospect data file is 106 Gb. Here is a sequence of events: 1. When I initially went to Restore, Retrospect successfully parsed my catalog of some 1.25 million files and I marked specific parts to restore. 2. When I clicked to Restore, Retrospect said it couldn't find the necessary volume even though it was mounted, so I cancelled. 3. When I tried again, Retrospect parsed the catalog again, but this time when I went to mark files, the snapshot was empty. 4. I have since tried several times to Rebuild the catalog from the Retrospect Data file but that doesn't seem to work (not sure why). Please help!