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Need Help With Retrospect 6.1 For Imac


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I have a computer with a WD My Book that came with Retrospect Express. Some idiot reinstalled the operating system on the iMac and deleted the catalog file that links to the backups on the external hard drive. I cannot find another catalog file on the external HDD. How do I go about creating one that will allow me to restore backup files from the external HDD to the computer? Please help because this has been bothering me for hours now and I cannot figure it out.

 

I have all incremental backups and full backup on the external HDD but I need a catalog file that is long gone. How can I get this up and running again?

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I have a computer with a WD My Book that came with Retrospect Express. Some idiot reinstalled the operating system on the iMac and deleted the catalog file that links to the backups on the external hard drive. I cannot find another catalog file on the external HDD. How do I go about creating one that will allow me to restore backup files from the external HDD to the computer? Please help because this has been bothering me for hours now and I cannot figure it out.

 

I have all incremental backups and full backup on the external HDD but I need a catalog file that is long gone. How can I get this up and running again?

You will need to rebuild the catalog. If the catalog was indeed kept on a different disk than the backup data, you must have enabled the option to use hard drives as removable disks (you may want to go to Preferences> Media handling to confirm that this option is still checked). Then in Retrospect's Directory window, go to Tools> Repair>, select the function "Rebuild from removable disks," and follow the instructions.

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You will need to rebuild the catalog. If the catalog was indeed kept on a different disk than the backup data, you must have enabled the option to use hard drives as removable disks (you may want to go to Preferences> Media handling to confirm that this option is still checked). Then in Retrospect's Directory window, go to Tools> Repair>, select the function "Rebuild from removable disks," and follow the instructions.

Thanks for your quick reply. When I click "Rebuild from removable disks" nothing happens. What am I missing? Also, I just installed the program and had HDD enabled in the options menu.

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You should get a pop-up Media Selection window. You mean this doesn't happen? Or that the disk isn't listed in that window?

 

I get a pop-up that allows me to select the HDD. However, as I mentioned in my previous post, when I scroll to the right it says 'content unrecognized'. Also, after I click on the HDD nothing happens.

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I just noticed that when I scroll to the right after selecting the Removable HDD it says "content unrecognized".

That suggests either that there are some other files on that disk volume in addition to the Retrospect data, that the backup set is a File backup set (which requires the catalog and the backup file to reside in the same folder on the disk volume), or that what you think is Retrospect data isn't or has been corrupted.

 

I'd first try selecting the "Repair file backup set" function and see if you can navigate to a file with a .cat extension. (I can't recall whether it's possible to select just the data file if the catalog is missing.)

 

If this fails and if there are non-Retrospect files on the volume, try copying them elsewhere and then deleting them; then try the removable disk rebuild function again.

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That suggests either that there are some other files on that disk volume in addition to the Retrospect data, that the backup set is a File backup set (which requires the catalog and the backup file to reside in the same folder on the disk volume), or that what you think is Retrospect data isn't or has been corrupted.

 

I'd first try selecting the "Repair file backup set" function and see if you can navigate to a file with a .cat extension. (I can't recall whether it's possible to select just the data file if the catalog is missing.)

 

If this fails and if there are non-Retrospect files on the volume, try copying them elsewhere and then deleting them; then try the removable disk rebuild function again.

That's the problem, I don't have a catalog file as it was deleted when someone reinstalled the operating system. I am assuming that this is a Retrospect backup files because I checked the WD model number and it reported that it came with the software.

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Also, why are there so many incremental backups (and one full backup)...

I'm wondering how you know this? Are those the file names that you see in Finder?

 

Retrospect 6 creates a single file for each backup set with the name of the backup set that was assigned by whoever created it (sounds like that wasn't you). Unless that person for some reason created a lot of different backup sets with variations on the name "Incremental," it sounds like these may not be Retrospect files. If you do a Get Info on the files, what extension do they have, and does it show that the default application to open them is Retrospect?

 

 

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I'm wondering how you know this? Are those the file names that you see in Finder?

 

Retrospect 6 creates a single file for each backup set with the name of the backup set that was assigned by whoever created it (sounds like that wasn't you). Unless that person for some reason created a lot of different backup sets with variations on the name "Incremental," it sounds like these may not be Retrospect files. If you do a Get Info on the files, what extension do they have, and does it show that the default application to open them is Retrospect?

I don't know much about Mac OS X but the file names are things like ".incrementalbackup" or ".sparseimage" or ".backup". I think it may be retrospect because I checked one log and "retrospect was in there". Also, the iMac runs Tiger and that was before Time Machine and Retrospect came with the WD HDD.

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I don't know much about Mac OS X but the file names are things like ".incrementalbackup" or ".sparseimage" or ".backup".

The ".sparseimage" extension refers to FileVault, an optional encryption scheme built into Mac OS X. To recover data from those files, you would need the password that was used at the time the files were encrypted.

 

I don't use Time Machine so I can't speak to whether the .backup or .incrementalbackup files belong to it or some other backup software, but those files definitely do not belong to Retrospect.

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