Bringing old catalogue files from retrospect 6.1 to 10

[Moggie]

Hi, I have just purchased the new version of Retrospect 10 as I have a new mac running OSX Mountain Lion and want to have all new programs running on it, I have used retrospect for many years and I find it great, I back up on this each night and that goes into my fireproof safe, as well as on a external hardrive (you can never be too careful!) the great thing is when I have finished with all the artwork files - I can then archive them onto Retrospect and then delete the files from my harddrive and they are easily retrieved again if needed, I can also guarantee my clients that I keep a full copy of their work too.

 

So, the problem is this, I have old catalogs that are from 2003, I have tied rebuilding them with this new retrospect and it says: "Empty catalog file or not a catalogue file", big problem, can anyone let me know what I can do and how to get them all back, I will also need to get it started again from the last daily back up too my 'daily back'.

 

I have the catalog files and also all the cds and DVD's they were backed up to as well.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Lennart_T]

You can't use the old catalog files. You need to recreate the catalog files in version 10 from the version 6 media.

[Moggie]

Oh no, so how do I do all those? thanks

[Lennart_T]

Look for "recatalog" or "recreate" (catalog file) in the User guide.

[Moggie]

Thanks but nothing is working, I am flabbergasted with this, I have tried everything, all those years have been lost because I can't get them back and no one can help me, there is no User Guide for Retrospect 10, and when I call support the automated response is the office is closed, at 12pm on a thursday!?

 

I have googled both those suggestions and there is no answer to the problem. It can't see the archive files or back ups on my hardrive or on the CD or DVD back up disks, what a disaster.

 

When I try it on the CD's it say device no ready.

[Lennart_T]

The User Guide should be available in the "Help" menu when running the console.

 

Your safest way would be to buy an old Mac that can run version 6 of Retrospect. That should be a PowerPC Mac, not an Intel Mac.

[Monafly]

An intel Mac will work just fine w/ RS 6 as long as it's running Mac OS no newer than 10.6.8

 

Moggie: you may have to enable the optical drive if that's the media your old backups are on. That should allow you to read them, but probably not write to CD's or DVD's with RS 10. Search the forum or knowledge base for how to do this.

[Lennart_T]

An intel Mac will work just fine w/ RS 6 as long as it's running Mac OS no newer than 10.6.8

Retrospect 6 is not supported on Snow Leopard, so 10.5.x is the last version.

 

Yes, you COULD run on an Intel Mac, but not natively. You must use Rosetta. Yes, Rosetta does a fine job, usually, but not always.

[Monafly]

I'm running it on an Mac mini (Model Identifier: Macmini 3,1 Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GHz) running 10.6.8. without any trouble. Yes-I'd forgotten that it was using Rosetta.

 

I was forced by RS to do this, as RS 10 no longer supports Win2000 clients and I have a couple of legacy scientific machines that can't be upgraded past 2000. I found our old RS 6.1 license and installed it on the same machine that is running RS10 so that I can backup ALL of my clients.

[David W Lee]

See http://retrospect.com/en/documentation/user_guide/mac10/whats_new#tips about "Restoring from Retrospect 6.x backups".

[tonwurm]

It´s so ridiculous ... a Backup-Application that cannot read it´s former backup-sets

 

I have HUNDREDS of DVD-Backups made with Retrospect 6. Rebuilding a catalog-file from only 1 of them lasts about 25 minutes !!! - it´s a shame

[Lennart_T]

Your best option is to run old software on old hardware.

Keep an old Mac running Retrospect 6.

[boomcha]

I agree, this is a major major major screwup and a bit of BS. Retrospect should spend the time and money and fix this issue for all of us that have used this software since the 90's. Rebuilding these version 5 and 6 catalogs takes A LOT of time since the media is fragile.

 

I just spent half a day installing Parallels and installing OS X 10.6 Server so that we don't have to boot up off a 10.6.8 installation (interrupting work) to retrieve old work that is sometimes required. My Parallels idea didn't work since Parallels doesn't access SCSI or Firewire devices.

 

The idea of old software on old hardware is a great one but if said machine dies and you have a few 10's of terabytes (all on 25GB AIT tapes, do the math) it becomes an exercise in futility.

 

Come on Retrospect get with the program and fix this. You are a back up software company.

[dbeaty2]

I have about 6 years of Back Up Sets on removable hard drives. These sets span several external hard drives and were created in version 6.X with OS 10.6.8 and previous OS. They all work fine. But I updated to Mountain Lion and need access to these back ups - as I have learned that Retrospect V6 will not run in Mountain Lion.

 

With Retrospect 10.2 on OS 10.8 I am unable to rebuild these sets as instructed in the manual. I select the Media Sets tab, add a new disc based Media Set. Click "Rebuild". This brings up a dialog with "Add Member" button. I click that and a window with the discs appear. Have 3 hard drives mounted with the V6 back up set and this show up as 1 -Disc BU, 2 -Disc BU, 3 -Disc BU. If I select any one of these and click "Next"  a blank dialog appears with "Select Disk Media Set Member:" 

 

Nothing appears here so I assume it does not find any usable "Disk Media Sets Members" on the back up set on the hard drive. I don't understand what is wrong. Looking at the hard drives contents, I see a "Retrospect Data" file on each one from the V6 back up.

 

I thought perhaps I chose the wrong type of Media Set - perhaps these were "removable", but selecting that type of Media Set and "rebuild", just shows the optical drives DVD and Blu-Ray.

 

Any other ideas on how I can get these Back Up Sets into V10.2? Should I downgrade to a previous version of Retrospect that will rebuild V6 spans?

 

Thanks

[Lennart_T]

How often do you restore from these old backups?

Do you always restore from the last backup (for each client)?

How many clients are we talking about? How much data?

 

What I am thinking is:

Buy a new (external) hard drive.

Using Retrospect 6.1 on old hardware, restore all files for each client to a separate folder on the new drive.

Backup the new drive to a new media set in Retrospect 10.2.

[dbeaty2]

I have a back up set for a two year period. We create videos, so lots of data in very large sizes.  For 2009-2011, there are perhaps 4TB in the storage set spanned on 4 Hard Drives. These were scripted back ups, so many snap shots. We may restore 500GB from one folder, one per month...when a client wants to make a change to an old project for instance.

 

So, I have perhaps 20-30 hard drives going back many years. I would be a challenge to move that much data. I may indeed get an old mac system with V6.x just for these old backups,  if I can't do this without it taking weeks of conversion. (even to re-catalog 4TB is a pain).

 

 One breakthrough, I went back to "removable media" media set type and the external hard drives appeared! (I did edit the retro.ini file in Application Support not sure if that's why) So I was able to select "Removable Media" as the type, the Hard Drives are now llisted below the optical drives, I added disk 1 and it's now showing "Busy".  We'll see what happens with the rest of the spanned hard drives when the first 1TB gets re-cataloged.

[derek500]

Your breakthrough makes sense. Disk media sets have only been avalable since Retrospect 8. Removable media sets are what 6.1 and back used.

 

I kept my old G5 PowerMac running 6.1 on OS X 10.4.8 so that I can back up my last remaining OS 9 client with a duplicate script. I then back up THAT backup volume to RS10. So my G5 Mac has 6.1 Server and 6.2 Client installed.

[Don Lee]

You should be able to read the CD/DVD sets if you properlly enable the drive.  The retro guys posted the link to the docs.

 

I've read quite a bit of Retro 6 data with v8/9/10, and it has some bugs, but it generally works.

[dbeaty2]

Not in front of the interface right now, but I found that when rebuilding from the removable media,  external hard drive media sets in my case,  would not show up in "needs media" in the activities window, in the drives list under the optical drives, until I cancel out and go to the disk media tab and hit refresh, that causes them to show up in the list,  then when I go back to activities, select the needs media icon again and now the drives appear. So the trick is to go back and refresh in the drive media section. Otherwise one might think the mounted drives with media sets are not available, but they really are. I've rebuilt about 20 TB this week. One trick, use an eSata RAID box and just load as many volumes in the backup set as you can. Run it overnight.

[mixaudio]

I'm trying to cope with the fact that Dantz won't offer a utility to convert v6 catalog sets.

 

I'm painfully discovering that rebuilding from media WON'T bring ALL sessions/snapshots back (yikes!).

 

My backup sessions in a particular set started in 2007. After "rebuilding from media" in v11, I see sessions only from 2010 to date, but no sessions from 2007 to 2010. I also clicked the "retrieve" button that appears on the lower right corner (this in v11) which allows you to add  sessions that appear listed there. Still there was nothing from 2007 thru 2010.

 

I know FOR SURE that backup sessions between 2007-2010 exist and are catalogued. If I browse the v6 catalog in Retrospect 6 (re-booting from an external drive with OSX 10.6.8) all those sessions appear listed. 

 

Rebuilding from a 1.1 TB backup is taking almost 10 hours and I've done it 2 or 3 times so far.

 

After rebuilding I tried running a "copy" script to see how much data was actually "saved" onto a new v11 set. As expected, only data from listed sessions is copied (2010 to date), so about 1/3 of data backed up between 2007 and 2010 is being left out.

 

So far, I've spent a bit over 50 hours attempting different things trying to get those sessions between 2007-2010 to become available in a Retrospect 11 Media Set rebuild but no success yet.

 

Right now, I'm attempting a full "data copy from one set onto a new set" in Retrospect 6, hoping that this will result in a media set that will include ALL sessions from 2007 to date that didn't appear in my first attempts to rebuild in v11. Then, re-boot in Mavericks and attempt a new "rebuild" from the resulting copied media set (another 8-10 hours for this… dang!).

 

If this doesn't work, I'm thinking of attempting a "repair" of the v6 data set and see if that does anything to the media set and then one more "rebuild" in v11.

 

Last, if none of this works, I'm considering a full "extract" of all 1.1 TB as individual files and folders onto an available drive. Obviously all "sessions" or "snapshots" from v6 catalog will be become useless. My other concern is that this will result in a lot of duplicate versions. Besides at some point I may have re-named hard drives or root folders, which will create even more duplicate files.  I guess then I'd have to manually "groom" the resulting extracted data…

 

Next… a big frustration sigh.

 

Good luck to me…

[neile1]

We have tons  of AIT-1 to AIT-5  backup sets since 2002 that need version Retrospect 6 in order to read from. 

We're curently using Retrospect ver 9 and would immediately  upgrade to a version that will let us read old backups..

 

 

 

Just a thoght..

Retrospect could have a legacy mode that could read the old set's.

in order to cover costs of development make it as an option.

 

 

[mixaudio]

Retrospect could have a legacy mode that could read the old set's.

in order to cover costs of development make it as an option.

 

I agree this would be a good solution. While I still think this should be a "standard feature", I'd probably pay for it if it was reasonably priced.

[neile1]

I agree this would be a good solution. While I still think this should be a "standard feature", I'd probably pay for it if it was reasonably priced.

 

The Retrospect application makes me feel insecure about our backup's, especially lacking option of reading old sets ...

I don't know if there are many of us since Ver 6 that suffer from this issue. The only way to find out is to post here...

[mixaudio]

The Retrospect application makes me feel insecure about our backup's, especially lacking option of reading old sets ...

I don't know if there are many of us since Ver 6 that suffer from this issue. The only way to find out is to post here...

 

Well, I was actually hesitant to upgrade to v11 for a while, precisely because this incompatibility issue has been around since Retrospect went up past v6. I just kept using booting up from a separate drive to use Retrospect 6, but then decided to give it a shot to avoid having to "re-boot" in an older OS every time I need to perform a backup operation.

[bcaef888-373a-4b65-b59e-f62d826d9e85]

I myself have dealt with this situation over the last few years, recovering just under 4 TB of archives from CD's and DVD's on a G5 Mac. One backup set, contained 461 CD's. Basically, I set the recoveries going, with what parameters I could bring into play, and fed Retrospect 6 the disks as it requested them. I stopped when I needed to, marked disks already recovered "missing" and started again, usually the next day. 

 

It's a PITA, but it's part of your job if you're responsible for archiving data. No organization at this time should be depending on tapes or optical disks for archiving purposes--the media just aren't reliable enough. If you are responsible for maintaining an archive of any kind you must be prepared to migrate to newer media from time to time. In fact, you should plan on it.