Archeological Data Restore From Old Cds

[39c600ef-0f12-4984-93cd-f4995da0f85a]

Hi everybody

I am trying restore a very old data backup stored on 150 CDs that I taped about 10 years ago on a Mac OS 9 system with Retrospect 4.2

Unfortunately, I do not have that old computer system and SCSI-CD-device any more. But I do have the installation CD of that old retrospect version for Mac and PC. I purchased an antique HP CD-writer 8200 at ebay according to the retrospect compatibility list hoping that I could revive that backup. I installed the PC version that came on that CD (retrospect 5, I think its retrospect express) on a windows 7 OS PC, got that old cd player USB-connected and installed with a driver I found on the web, but retrospect gives me the error "wrong format" when I put in one of the CDs. There was also a script error coming up which looked like a Windows-7-incompatibility issue. Unfortunately, I do not have the backup catalog any more. Now, this looks like some archeological work for me now and sort of gave up. However, I really would like to restore this old database since there are some nice historical pictures from my family in there that I lost in the meantime.

Does anybody have any idea how could get this to work??? I also have a Macbook Pro runnig OS X. But that doesnt seem to help anything without OS 9...

What I could think of would be try to run it again on a Windows XP machine?? How is the backward data format compatibility if I would install the most recent retrospect version (which I tried and actually got the same error message "wrong format"). How can I find out which "format" the data have on the CDs in case there are different formats which require specific strategies.

Any help is very much appreciated. Thanks!!

Matthias

[Lennart_T]

It isn't until Retrospect 8 that the backup set format is cross-platform compatible.

 

You need to get hold of an old Mac, capable of running Mac OS 9 and Retrospect 4.x (or 5.0).