Frustrated and baffled

[glashoppah]

I have two Maxtor external OneTouch drives, a 300G and a 700G, both USBv2.0. Both came with Retrospect v1.x. After filling my 300G drive with 22 "restore points", Retrospect stopped working. I upgraded it to v1.1, but this did not fix it. I pretty much just ignored it for about a year, annoyed at its inability to groom as it was supposed to and its bizarre, unintuitive menu-less interface, which locked up as often as it ran properly.

 

A few days ago I decided to renew my faith in Retrospect and bought v2.5 online, mainly because I had a lot of drive space already devoted to its "restore points." I downloaded it and installed it. I was dismayed that the interface was not improved, but I went through the motions of setup and told it to use not only the 300G drive but also my 700G drive. It promptly used 300G of the 700G drive for new backup data (adding another 8 restore points), which was about double the size of my PC's drives. I noted that Retrospect was backing up the backup drives, so I removed them via setup from the backup process. I then changed the usage percentage of the drives from "all available" to "75%" hoping for some drive space recovery. Retrospect did indeed say it was "recovering" space, and it deleted 22 of its restore points - but the size of the backup data on the drives is completely unchanged.

 

Is there any kind of guide to how this software is supposed to work? It's really exasperating, especially after paying for it.

 

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Update: Went in thru "Restore" and removed the "restore points" for the improperly backed-up backup drives, and they're gone (I'm down from 28 restore points to 4), and the software said it was "reclaiming disk space" for a while, and now it appears to be done (menu back to "normal", no drive activity on backup drives) - but not one speck of disk space was freed. 300G drive still full, 700G drive still has 300G used by restore points. Even more frustrated and baffled.

Edited July 5, 2009 by Guest