Retrospect Express Snapshots - I only see one snapshot

[apecrazy]

I have been playing around with my new Westerndigital External Drive. My understanding is that when you do progressive backups, you should have a snapshot so you can get a file from any point in time you did a backup. (example, I do 5 nightly backups. I changed changeme.txt each of those days. I should have 5 snapshots with all five versions of changeme.txt, right?)

 

I only see a snapshot from the last backup. I am doing a normal backup, not recycle backup. Am I doing something wrong?

 

p.s.

I did call western didital "support engineer" and they said, "It doesn't do multiple snapshots. It wasn't designed that way, and if they did do that, the backup size would continually grow."

I told her she was contradicting the help file, but she stuck with her story anyway. GAAH!

[Alan G]

Apecrazy....that noise on the other side of that brick wall you are banging your head against is me.

 

 

 

Well, I came here yesterday about an hour after you had been here and as coincidence would have it, you had just asked what I had come to ask. So….I decided to wait with you for an answer. When it appeared an answer may not be forthcoming on the subject, I went back to trying to figure it out some more and had some apparent luck. You are absolutely right of course about what the User Manual states and hopefully the one who told you the software didn’t allow that will learn something if they read this.

 

 

 

Anyway, I will try to explain what I did.

 

 

 

Open Retrospect and then close any windows that may open by default such as the “Backup” window. Then on the menu on the left-hand side of the screen under “Configure” click on “Backup Sets”. If yours is similar to mine you will have your backup set showing in the window that opens. Double click on the backup set name.

 

 

 

A new window will open with five tabs across the top of the window. Click on the “Sessions” tab. You will now see all the progressive backups listed by session and date which is what we were both looking for. Locate the particular session folder you need and either double-click on it or use the “Browse” button. This will open a new window showing all the folders that were backed up on that session with the included files.

 

 

 

Find the folders and/or files you want to retrieve. I initially assumed you would put “checks” in the “flag” block to mark the folders/files you wanted but that did not seem to work for me. Holding the “ctrl” key down, click on and hi-light the folders/files you want to retrieve. Then go to the top menu of this open window and note that the second icon from the left is the “retrieve” icon. First, close any of the other windows that have been opened in this process. Then click on the “retrieve” icon and the folders/files you have designated will be retrieved and placed on your hard drive. Assuming your hard drive is “C” you should then find a new folder under “C:/” named “Select Backup Files” which contains the folders/files you wanted retrieved.

 

 

 

This process does not seem to be in the user manual but does seem to work. Don’t have a clue if it’s the right way or not….but it works. If you have any problems or my directions fail you, holler back and I will try to clarify.

 

 

 

Alan_G

[apecrazy]

Wow.. that is a finicky process! Good work figuring that one out and thanks for the reply.

 

-Aaron