Questions to a Retrospect expert

[DelShannon]

Dear all!

 

So, we´re a small business (6-8 clients) and we are using Retrospect 9.02 for Macintosh. Yesterday a colleague of mine headed for vacation and on the train to the airport someone stole his back pack. Unfortunately he had his computer there.

 

Today when I was trying to retrieve all that I could from his recent backups I couldnt find him in the list of possible machines to retrieve.

We are using two scripts that run every second week on two removable disks (1TB). Each monday is recycle backup and tuesday, wednesday and thursday is normal backup. One of the disks are kept off site in case of fire and burgulary.

 

The problem is now that my colleague has a laptop that he sometimes takes with him and it seems not that he has missed two weeks, or no backup has been done on his machine (if its him or Retrospect itself Im not sure about). The result is that we cant find any of his files to retrieve. I can see that he was last backed up on the 13th of november.

 

Does anyone has a solution, I realize that the disks get erased every monday but they hold a lot of data so I was kind of hoping that it was some trick to examine the disks to see if there are any files belonging to him?

 

Second question is that I have an old removable disk that has a file from last year that is 512 GB and its called "Retrospect Data" but I am only seeing a white icon so I have no idea if it can be opened or if anything can be retrieved from that file? Probably its created in an old version of Retrospect but I bought new ones when upgrading to version 9.02. Does anyone knows how to deal with that file? Its located on the same disk that was used as media in our previous scripts. Its a year old but a lot of the files on my colleagues computer hasnt changed so its better than nothing.

 

We are located in the southern part of Sweden and if anyone has ideas or thoughts we would of course be interested in paying for professional service. We have tried with the support but we didnt get any luck there. Answer was pretty vague.

 

Best regards

 

Tom

[Lennart_T]

Unfortunately, I have no solution for you. I want to pass on a tip to prevent this from happening in the future.

 

Do not recycle. Do grooming instead. Set the grooming to keep (at least) the last five backups.

 

I work in Helsingborg and I have both versions 6 and 9 of Retrospect on my Mac at work. I can take a look on your old drive, no charge. I'm back on the office on Tuesday.

Click on my picture to the left and then click the button "Send me a message".

[Don Lee]

It is really important to ensure that your backup regimen matches your needs. Grooming is one way to address this problem, but it is better to have 2 or 3 layers of assurance. How you do this depends on how much data you need to keep, and how often it changes. It also depends on how long your laptops are "absent". If your backup cycle only keeps 2 weeks, and a laptop is gone for 3 weeks, you have no backup, as you've found.

 

The balance is to keep enough backup data to cover "worst case" without keeping so much that you waste a lot of effort and money maintaining it.

[Lennart_T]

This was a great learning experience.

 

I managed to restore over 60 GB from the "home" directory and about 7GB of documents in the root of the hard drive.

 

Here's what I did:

I had access to the hard drive with a (now relatively small) recycled backup. I needed the deleted files and I have Data Rescue 3 from http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

Out of the box it can't recover deleted Retrospect's rbd files. There is a function called FileIQ. If you have at least five existing and undamaged files of a certain type, then DR3 can learn how to recover them.

So DR3 rescued 1375 deleted rdb files, about 1TB of data.

 

I wrote a small app that renamed the files to the standard AT000xxx.rdb numbering. The number is in the header of the files. However, there were duplicates so they were given a high number by adding 20000 to the number (the highest numbered file was around 800.)

 

Then I removed the rbd files that were smaller than the "standard" 629MB since they stopped the rebuild/repair operation in Retrospect.

Even after rebuilding/repairing the Media set, there were no snapshots. So I had to search for files. Thankfully Retrospect was able to give me the name of the source and also the paths to the files to restore, so I didn't have to try to restore files from the other sources.

Then I removed the rdb files with the lowest numbers, leaving the "20000" series. Did a new rebuild/repair session and repeated the restore with searching for files. This gave me another set of client files. Mostly duplicates, of course.

 

Hope this helps someone in a similar situation.