Why Are Some Disk Backup Sets Not Recognized?

[orubin]

I lost a drive to a hard crash a few days ago. Sadly it contained all my catalog files. But I had backed them up, along with all the other data on that drive, so I thought I was OK.

 

In order to recover the data, I needed the catalogs. My first attempt was to rebuild the catalog file for the saved catalogs. That failed, So I tried to recover the drive data itself. That failed.

In both cases, I need to recreate the catalog files, and when I launch the Repair Catalog tool, and then point it to the disk that contains all the backup set files, only 8 of the 11 backups show up ready to rebuild.

 

The error I get is: "The selected disk does not contains any Backup Set data files, please select another disk."

 

Why does it say this. It does indeed contain data files. The program just ignores them.

 

When I open the location of the Disk Backup Set, I see files there. I see LOTS of files there for the three I need. But Retrospect says there is no backup set there.

 

I have backup data, i just do not have a catalog now. Is there some way I can get at the data? Is there something I am missing here that prevents the three critical items from opening? (Of course, it is the three items I need the most. That always figures.)

 

Any idea anyone?

 

Thanks in advance.

Edited August 31, 2011 by o.rubin

[orubin]

OK, I am going to partially answer my own questions here with a hack and a workaround, but I would love to know WTF is happening here:

 

I copied the bakup set data files to a new folder, selected that folder for rebuild catalog, and it still did not work.

 

So I decided to rename all the files to the same name as used in one of the sets that did work. I noted that each set of data has different first two letters, and the files in this set were names CT0000xx.rdb

 

So, taking a name from a set that did work, I renamed all the files to CR0000xx.rdb and tried again. This time, the data WAS recognized as valid backup set data files and the restore worked.

 

So why does the name make a difference?

 

By the way, once I restored the old catalogs, the program had no trouble at all using the data from the other sets that it claimed did not exist and could not rebuild a catalog from.

 

This looks like a serious bug to me, and undermines my ability to trust this program some. I was luck that this hack worked. What happens next time?

 

Anyone have any clues as to why the name should make a difference?

[rsleegers]

Something that has tripped me up in the past is trying to point directly to a backup folder. For e.g. if my backup is in d:\Retrospect\Backupname I have to point to d: only, then choose from the list of backups that Retrospect finds. Retrospect looks for the Retrospect folder and zero-byte Dantz file within it.