cbdd7859-396c-48cf-9fab-834d52e7361a Posted October 16, 2011 Report Share Posted October 16, 2011 Hi all, We're migrating our small non-profit network from Windows (workgroup) to make use of a shiny almost-new Snow Leopard Mac Mini Server. We've also recently replaced our laptops, which now run Win 7 x64. We have Windows Retrospect 7.6, and a friend bought a (probably useless) copy of Mac Retrospect 8.2 (thinking the clients are compatible with 7.6) In reality... I'm thinking we're stuck between a rock and a hard place: * If we continue to run Retrospect on Windows (7.7 for Win 7 compatibility), we would need a Mac Server Client to backup the Mac... but can't do that without a Server edition of Retrospect. * If we move Retrospect to the Mac (preferred as our Windoze backup machine is VERY old)... apparently there's no version of Mac Retrospect that supports full restore of Windows 7. Anyone see a way out? Your thoughts mucho appreciated! (Maybe we need to run Parallels on the Mac, with Windows and ??? underneath? ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniels Posted October 17, 2011 Report Share Posted October 17, 2011 Actually 7.7 clients on Windows are compatible with Mac Retrospect 8.2 All of my Window clients are running 7.7.114 and I have not had any problems backing up or restoring. When I restore I always manually select files to backup just to make sure I catch everything. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cbdd7859-396c-48cf-9fab-834d52e7361a Posted October 18, 2011 Author Report Share Posted October 18, 2011 Actually 7.7 clients on Windows are compatible with Mac Retrospect 8.2 All of my Window clients are running 7.7.114 and I have not had any problems backing up or restoring. When I restore I always manually select files to backup just to make sure I catch everything. So is this KB article wrong? http://kb.roxio.com/search.aspx?URL=/content/000027RT&PARAMS=set-locale=en Retrospect 8 for Mac is also not able to successfully back up and restore an entire Windows 7 client. I would LOVE to know it is incorrect! I have no problem restoring files. It is bare-metal restore I'm concerned about. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniels Posted October 18, 2011 Report Share Posted October 18, 2011 Since Windows 7 uses a separate area of the disk for booting and since this area is not visible to older Retrospects the article is correct in that you can not fully restore an entire Windows 7 client into a bootable state. However if you have a bootable Windows 7 machine you can restore individual files to that client which may or may not include the entire disk. If you want to restore an entire Windows 7 client into a bootable state you need to use Retrospect 7.7 for Windows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cbdd7859-396c-48cf-9fab-834d52e7361a Posted October 18, 2011 Author Report Share Posted October 18, 2011 Since Windows 7 uses a separate area of the disk for booting and since this area is not visible to older Retrospects the article is correct in that you can not fully restore an entire Windows 7 client into a bootable state. However if you have a bootable Windows 7 machine you can restore individual files to that client which may or may not include the entire disk. If you want to restore an entire Windows 7 client into a bootable state you need to use Retrospect 7.7 for Windows. It is not so much that there is a "separate area of the disk" for booting. Windows has (since XP) a special registry database of system settings, which cannot be simply overwritten while the system is running. Thus, restoring the system state requires a special procedure, which apparently is different in Win7 than before. When I recently recovered a full Win7 backup made with version 7.6, onto a bootable Win7 machine, all regular files were restored but the system configuration was badly mangled because of the above problem. Half my installed apps were no longer there, many others crash, etc etc. I'm having to do a clean reinstall of all apps from scratch. --- and that of course is what I want to avoid in the future. What this says to me is that Mac Retrospect does not yet provide System-level support for Windows 7... which is quite sad! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniels Posted October 19, 2011 Report Share Posted October 19, 2011 If you look at the Disk management on a Windows 7 machine you will see a System Reserved partition and this is where Windows 7 keeps its boot information so without restoring that partition you can only restore files and it is also never a good idea to restore the registry. Windows XP did not have this partition and the main reason this partition was introduced was to speed up boot times. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cbdd7859-396c-48cf-9fab-834d52e7361a Posted October 20, 2011 Author Report Share Posted October 20, 2011 If you look at the Disk management on a Windows 7 machine you will see a System Reserved partition and this is where Windows 7 keeps its boot information so without restoring that partition you can only restore files and it is also never a good idea to restore the registry. Windows XP did not have this partition and the main reason this partition was introduced was to speed up boot times. I'm sorry, this response does not make much sense... 1) There are many ways to restore the Reserved partition. At the least, the way Retrospect works, one must begin a full system restore with an already-booting copy of Windows 7, which (therefore) has the Reserved partition in place. Not an issue. 2) It is ALWAYS important to restore the registry as part of a full system restore. If you don't do that, your system will be in very bad shape. Windows has long had its own "System Restore" capability which does this. Retrospect also has this capability... it is a specific feature of the product! You can choose whether to just restore files and/or restore system state. I've done it many times on XP. SO... it appears you are again confirming what I suspected: Retrospect Mac can restore system state on XP (and perhaps on Vista, I don't know) but not (yet?) on Windows 7. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniels Posted October 20, 2011 Report Share Posted October 20, 2011 Until Mac Retrospect can see the boot partition used for booting in Windows 7 I would say there is no way to absolutely completely restore a Windows 7 machine. Vista also used this boot partition so I would suspect it has the same issues as Windows 7. If you can get Windows 7 to a point where you can see Windows restore points you can then try using Windows restore to return to a previous system state. Hopefully in the next release of Restrospect they will allow backup of the Windows 7 boot partition. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cbdd7859-396c-48cf-9fab-834d52e7361a Posted October 25, 2011 Author Report Share Posted October 25, 2011 Until Mac Retrospect can see the boot partition used for booting in Windows 7 I would say there is no way to absolutely completely restore a Windows 7 machine. Vista also used this boot partition so I would suspect it has the same issues as Windows 7. If you can get Windows 7 to a point where you can see Windows restore points you can then try using Windows restore to return to a previous system state. Hopefully in the next release of Restrospect they will allow backup of the Windows 7 boot partition. Same problem apparently in both Mac R'spect, and Win 7.6 R'spect with Windows 7. And it has nothing to do with boot partitions. As I said, ANY "bare metal restore" on Windows requires that you first restore the machine to a bootable state, which of course includes the boot partition. Then Retrospect comes into the picture. Restoring all files without restoring system state does not come even close to getting you where you need to be... because "all files" does not include the hidden System files, such as the files involved in System State preservation. What you get as a result is a mess. Files up to date, system state as of whenever your "bootable version" was setup... plus an unknown (or ill-defined) set of intermediate stuff. From the Retrospect perspective: the system may not be bootable after restore. From my experience: it was bootable, but literally half of my installed software had disappeared, and the rest generally starts up with a zillion errors. I'm having to go back to a clean reinstall of all software. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cygnis Posted October 26, 2011 Report Share Posted October 26, 2011 As I said, ANY "bare metal restore" on Windows requires that you first restore the machine to a bootable state, which of course includes the boot partition. Then Retrospect comes into the picture. Retrospect 7.7 on the PC does things quite differently. A new disaster recovery process was one of the biggest changes compared to version 7.6: http://img.roxio.com/retrospect/win-7_7-user-guide-addendum.pdf Just letting you know, in case you're also considering an upgrade to 7.7 (instead of switching to the Mac version). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cbdd7859-396c-48cf-9fab-834d52e7361a Posted October 26, 2011 Author Report Share Posted October 26, 2011 I spoke with Tech Support this morning, and learned several things: 1) The KB article referenced above is now outdated. Mac Retrospect 8.2 DOES provide full support for restoring Windows 7 computers. It uses the 7.7 windows client. 2) They do promise 8.2 works... but that it has every bit the same (grooming etc) issues as earlier releases. A new version should be available "very soon". Not to expect magically better backups than we got from Windows. And, just FYI but slightly O/T for this thread... 3) Which computer you run as server/client etc is completely platform-independent. Just purchase sufficient client/server licenses for your network layout, and you can apparently mix/match platforms as you like. So, with a single-server plus N client licenses, you can run Mac, Win or Linux as the Server, and run the actual backups on any server or client you like! Nice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
51ae86ee-d35a-4c46-b879-c3b8399377a3 Posted October 28, 2011 Report Share Posted October 28, 2011 Well, here's the way I would handle it: 1) Continue to use the Windows Retrospect 7.7 server since it seems to be a fair bit more reliable, and it has been working for you. 2) Use something completely different for the Mini server, and run its own backups. Carbon Copy Cloner, Synchronize Pro, and others are good options. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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