ecampbell Posted May 6, 2011 Report Share Posted May 6, 2011 (edited) Initial Scenario: An external disk used for retrospect backups was formatted (and was not used after formatting so there was little overwrite). A recovery tool found 300 or so ?intact? RDB files and saved them to an additional unused external drive. I'm not expecting to recover all the backed up data but finding even a bit would be extremely helpful. What I'm doing: Tools: Repair Catalog: Recreate from disks: Choose "All Disks" (then browse to folder containing the .RDB files and hit OK) Retrospect's next prompt is "Select a Backup Set to recatalog" (the correct catalog name already highlighted/selected). OK. Are there any more disks in this backup set? No. Continue with the recatalog with missing files? Continue.... Problem: I then get the following alert (error): The backup set data file name is invalid, cannot recatalog the set using these files. (and there are no further steps to take) ...I've seen some discussions about this error message and I'm assuming some RDB files are corrupt... Is there a way to check which RDB files are still intact? I could manually put each RDB file on a disk by itself, try to repair the catalog and cross my fingers but given I've got over 300 RDB files, this woud be pretty time consuming (and no guarantee of success) ...alternately, is there a way to recover some intact data from a problematic RDB file (again, even recovering a few files would be extremely helpful). Finally, while it would be bad news, if some of you experts confirm that I'm just out of luck, that would be helpful in that I'll stop wasting my time fiddling around with this.... Thanks in advance! Eric Edited May 6, 2011 by Eric Campbell Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
008e3f8f-ac2d-4494-8f82-24d5c4ae8d5b Posted May 10, 2011 Report Share Posted May 10, 2011 Retrospect creates and erases RDB files all the time, depending on your settings, like grooming and/or recycle. So unless your drive was previously DoD-wiped and only written those RDB files sequentially without any erasing/recycling etc. chances are you'll end up with far more 'restored' (and corrupt) RDB files when doing an unerase. Furthermore the naming of them will probably be incorrect. Unformatting can be done by experts, but in reality it's very often not possible to recreate the exact state of the disk as it was when it was formatted. It can be a nice security breach though, as some/a lot information can be extracted, but unfortunately often not in the way you want in this case. You can either give up and learn from this mistake (actually you have not been using Retrospect as a means of backup, but more likely as a (single point of failure) archiver), or try to fiddle with it and (quite likely) spent a lot of time without results. Considering you only have a bunch of randomly named and (some) maybe corrupt RDB-files I think you'll probably waste your time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ecampbell Posted May 10, 2011 Author Report Share Posted May 10, 2011 Thanks -- that is the conclusion I had arrived at as well over the past few days -- but it's nice to have a second opinion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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