Reverting back to v8.5 from 9.0

[aesmith 4]

Due to instability I have had to revert back to Retrospect version 8.5.

 

Are the backups created by version 9.0 compatible with 8.5? Things for the most part seem to be working using the last backups created by version 9 but right now when trying to recreate a catalog file that was corrupted due to v9 crashing, I am getting

> Backup Set format inconsistency (2 at 638214404) over and over(like 1000s of them).

 

 

[Scillonian 52]

According to the manual (page 639), as long as Block Level Incremental Backup has not been used with the backup set it should remain compatible with previous versions of Retrospect. However if Block Level Incremental Backup has been used with the backup set then it is only compatible with Retrospect 9 and later. (Basically earlier versions of Retrospect won't know what block level file fragments are and how to handle them.)

[aesmith 4]

That would make sense. Only very few clients seemed to have used the block level and this was one of them.

[aesmith 4]

So can a catalog file rebuild prune these incompatible parts of the backup or do I need to recycle my backups and start from scratch keeping my fingers crossed that nothing fails until I get a new enterprise wide backup set base?

[Scillonian 52]

A catalog rebuild using Retrospect 8.5 should fail because it has no knowledge of what the block fragments are so will see the .RDB files that contain them as corrupt.

 

What may work in theory for a backups set that contains backups from Retrospect 8.5 is to use Retrospect 9.0 to groom out any backups added with Retrospect 9.0 (this should remove any .RDB files created by Retrospect 9.0 and leave only those created by Retrospect 8.5) then using Retrospect 8.5 to rebuild the catalog if necessary.

 

From within Retrospect 9.0 a transfer snapshots to a new backup set may also work if you have the space available. As Retrospect does not enable block level by default there is a chance that files affected by block level are expanded to their full size during the transfer. (I can find no references to what happens with snapshot transfers.)

[klubar 2]

Due to instability I have had to revert back to Retrospect version 8.5. Are the backups created by version 9.0 compatible with 8.5? Things for the most part seem to be working using the last backups created by version 9 but right now when trying to recreate a catalog file that was corrupted due to v9 crashing, I am getting > Backup Set format inconsistency (2 at 638214404) over and over(like 1000s of them).

I'm looking at upgrading to 9 and would like to hear more about your problems.. thanks

[aesmith 4]

I am still trying to recover from the backup corruption that version 9.0 created. Seems to have something to do with the block level backup option. It seemed to work fine until I turned this on. I am going to wait until the bugs are worked out before I give this another try.

 

Block level backup would have been great if it worked as a lot of the biggest parts of the backups in our location are PST files.

[Scillonian 52]

@aesmith

 

Did you by any chance follow the logging advice given to you in the following post and also have e-mail notifications enabled?

 

http://forums.retrospect.com/index.php?/topic/151039-block-level-backup-for-vmware/?p=257674

 

What I found was that with logging set at '5' and e-mail notification of successful backup on would consistently cause Retrospect to crash and eventually caused corruption of the catalog file. (Luckily the rebuild of the catalog appears to have worked so far.) Monitoring the progress of a backup the crash appeared to occur when Retrospect tried to send the notification e-mail. My guess is the e-mail is too big to send but as nothing of the backup log remains after the crash I can't say for sure.

[aesmith 4]

No I have all email notifications turned off.