vyotsukura Posted February 27, 2006 Report Share Posted February 27, 2006 My 60GB Powerbook hard drive crashed badly a week ago and thanks to a recent backup courtesy of Retrospect 6.1 and a Lacie AIT tape drive, I thought I could be back up and running as soon as I obtained a new hard drive, installed it in my Powerbook Titanium, and ran a full restore. The first few steps went fine - got the hard drive, removed the old drive and replaced it with the new one and started a complete restore from a backup, after cataloging my backup tape from another Mac and connecting the Powerbook to that Mac in Target Disk Mode. I figured that with a FireWire connection, the restore would go fairly quickly. My old hard drive had about 27GB of data, so it took about 3 hours to copy it from my tape to the new hard drive. When the progress dialog said '0 files,' I figured I was almost done. Then the 'Completing restore...' message came up and there is has stayed for 19 hours now, while Retrospect chugged through every one of the 550000 files on the backup, fixing Unix file permissions, as noted in another post here. Then I did a calculation - at a rate of about 2 files per second, 120 files per minute, my 27GB backup would take a total of 3 days to complete. I don't recall seeing anything in the documentation about a full restore taking several days, but am I doing something wrong? Am I stuck just waiting for this to finish? A 3 or 4 day full restore for a fairly small hard drive seems a little excessive, but am I off base? Any comments or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hmseiden Posted February 27, 2006 Report Share Posted February 27, 2006 Many people doing a full restore start with a fresh OS X system installation separate from the Retro data restore, or at least install a system on the start up drive before a full restore begins. I am one of those folks. I use a system image that I can drag across from my start up FW drive. I keep an 80 GB drive for Mac installs specifically for that purpose. If you have multple Macs that's a big time saver. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vyotsukura Posted February 27, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 27, 2006 Great! Thanks for the tip. Just a basic question since I don't see a PDF manual online that I can refer to but how does the full restore from backup work with the fresh system on the target volume? Do all of the old volume's system settings, network settings, user accounts, etc. get integrated into the fresh system? Or does it just drop one big folder onto the hard drive after which I need to manually recreate all of these and then drop the restored files back into the folders where they belong? Also, if I install a fresh system, to what extent do I need to be careful that the name of the volume is the same, the names of the users, etc.? I would much prefer not to wait another 2 days for my restore to finish, so your alternative sounds great. Thanks for your help! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted February 27, 2006 Report Share Posted February 27, 2006 Quote: ... since I don't see a PDF manual online that I can refer to ... Here is a link in the forums to the Retrospect 6.0 User Guide in PDF format: Retrospect 6.0 User Guide and here is a link to the Retrospect 6.1 Read Me file (describing changes from 6.0): Retrospect 6.1 Read Me Hope this helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vyotsukura Posted February 28, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 28, 2006 Thanks for these links! They will be very helpful. Now if only EMC/Dantz could make these files easier to find on the support website! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waltr Posted February 28, 2006 Report Share Posted February 28, 2006 hi vince, they are also in the installer that you either downloaded or purchased on a CD...... they are the funny looking files under the installer that say, 'Read Me-Retrospect.htm' and 'Retrospect Users Guide.pdf'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vyotsukura Posted March 1, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 1, 2006 Hi waltr, Thanks for the info! At the time I wrote that particular post, I was at the office without access to my install CD at home, so I was looking for something online. But I should have read those files more carefully before I started my restore - it did recommend that I install a fresh system on the empty drive before running the full restore. In any event, when I got home 2 days after starting my full restore, I found that the process had finished and my restore was done. It didn't actually take nearly as long as I had feared from my calculation. I started it late Saturday night and by Monday evening, possibly earlier, it was done. I tried rebooting the Powerbook normally after disconnecting it from my kids' Mac and presto, I was back in business. I haven't found anything yet that does not work. One final question that remains unanswered though: If I did follow the manual and install a fresh OS X system prior to executing 'Restore an entire disk,' would all of the backed up volume's system settings, network settings, user accounts, file permissions and preferences be integrated into this new system from the backup set? I hope that they would. This is a critical question because if they are not, then I would almost rather go the route that I actually did and just wait for the full restore to reset all of those file permissions, since it ultimately took less time than I had imagined. Having to recreate user accounts, configure wireless network configurations and such would probably take more time than waiting for the full restore without a fresh system to finish. Thanks for all the help! - Vince Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waltr Posted March 1, 2006 Report Share Posted March 1, 2006 hi vince, yes, if you did the 'replace entire disk' on a freshly installed OS X it would add the user accounts and everything. however, one thing to keep in mind with that kind of restore ('live restore') is that you'd need to have the fresh OS X be the same as the one that is backed up. in my experience, this is because not all files get overwritten, so you would not, for example, install 10.3 and then restore 10.4 over the top of that. for that matter, i'd make sure that if i was on 10.4.2, that i did a clean install of 10.4.2 before the restore. you'll see from my other postings on this forum, that i am not a big fan of the live restore. i prefer the method you used ('target mode') or to boot from an external FW HD to do my restores. i feel there is less to worry about, and less chance that i make a mistake. on windows i prefer a 'parallel install' but that is for another section of this forum. my $.02. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vyotsukura Posted March 2, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 2, 2006 Hi again, Very interesting. Thanks very much for your comments. I will make a point to peruse your other postings regarding the pros and cons of the live restore option. I'm glad to hear that the method I used has its advantages. - Vince Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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