I keep an App on my Desktop. Where does it back up?

[sbken]

Today I needed to Restore an Application that I keep on my Desktop. It is the App itself, not an alias. It appears that my daily backups do *not* back up this Application. I hope I'm wrong but I've does several "Finds" in Retrospect and the Application does not appear to be in any backup file. Does Retrospect backup any items that are kept on the Desktop?

 

Retrospect 6.1.126, OS 10.4.6 and 1.25GHz G4 Power Mac dual-Processor

[nekr0phage]

Hi,

 

If you're backing up the whole drive then yes, your desktop will be backed up. Perform a find files restore and don't enter any search criteria, this should bring up the entire list of files/folders in the backup. Then check the path /Users/(user name)/Desktop.

[sbken]

Gosh! You advice looked soooo good. I thought it did the trick. But, unfortunately, it didn't. The Application I'm trying to restore is called "Shredder". When I followed your excellent instructions I found a Folder named "Shredder.app".

 

Viola! I thought.

 

I restored the Folder and found it contained the following:

 

Shredder.app

.DS_Store

Contents

.DS_Store

Info.plist

pbdevelopment.plist

PkgInfo

 

Alas, no Application file! Does this mean Retrospect cannot back up some items or that I didn't configure my backup parameters correctly?

 

Any other thoughts/suggestions?

[nekr0phage]

Hi,

 

Shredder.app is the file you are looking for. If you Get Info on any application in your Applications directory, you will see under the Name & Extension section that the file is called, for example, Calculator.app.

[rhwalker]

Ah, the illusion is too good. What you think are "applications" are really folders. It's how Apple allows developers to bundle all the bits of an application together for easy movement in case a user wants to move the "application" from one place to another. This change was necessitated when "resources" were no longer possible with the migration to unix. If you go to the Finder > Preferences > Advanced and click the "show all file extensions" checkbox, you will see that the "applications" in your applications folder end in ".app". If you then select (highlight) the "application" in the Finder and right click on it (or hold down the control key while depressing the mouse button, if you've only got one button - thank you, Steve Jobs) and select "Show Package Contents", you will see the contents of the "application" (really a folder).

 

All smoke and mirrors. The ".DS_Store" items are used by the finder to save window positions, view styles, etc. Other files do other magic.

 

You can do the same thing using Terminal, navigate to the /Applications folder, do an

ls -al

and you will see the various folders, and you can then "cd" into the folders. Use the Terminal command

man ls

or

man cd

to see the various commands. Get out of the man (manual) command by q (you can do man man to see its commands, too).

 

Enjoy. Everything is happening correctly.

 

Russ

[nekr0phage]

Thanks for the info, Russ. I had been rather curious as to just how that worked.

[sbken]

I appreciate the responses. Unfortunately, when I do a Find for "Shredder.app" all that turns up is a small (8K) file in the Shredder.app folder that is named "DS-store". The Shredder.app is nowhere to be seen and I've done a Restore both from a daily backup from a week ago and from my last month's backup.

 

Looks as if I'm out of luck. In the future I'll store all apps in my HD folder and only put an alias in the Desktop. Maybe that will solve future problems. Don't seen any solution for the current problem, though.

[rhwalker]

This has nothing to do with whether the file is on your desktop or somewhere else (unless you have crafted a very odd selector that is filtering things).

 

Sounds like you didn't do the restore correctly, and it only pulled in a changed file for that one day. How did you do the restore? Point being, your responses are conflicting. In one of your posts above, you state that:

Quote:

---

I found a Folder named "Shredder.app". ... I restored the Folder and found it contained the following:

 

Shredder.app

.DS_Store

Contents

.DS_Store

Info.plist

pbdevelopment.plist

PkgInfo

 

---

Then later you state:

Quote:

---

Unfortunately, when I do a Find for "Shredder.app" all that turns up is a small (8K) file in the Shredder.app folder that is named "DS-store". The Shredder.app is nowhere to be seen and I've done a Restore both from a daily backup from a week ago and from my last month's backup.

 

---

It looks to me like you are not correctly selecting the files for restore. You want to select the entire "Shredder.app" folder (package - all the stuff that is bundled as the applciation).

 

When you browse the contents of your snapshot that you are about to restore from, and click open the little triangles, do you see all of the files inside the .app folder, or only the .DS_Store file?

 

The restore does work, we just have to figure out what is happening in your case. First step is to make sure that the everything is getting backed up into the snapshot.

 

Report back what you see. We will try to help you get it going. The Retrospect interface is a steep learning curve (I wish it had a more Finder-like interface for browsing and selecting files to restore, but that's an enhancement for a future version). You are making a wise decision to figure it all out and test the restore procedure before you have a crisis and your palms become sweaty and your heart starts beating fast.

 

Russ