RDB files missing from catalog after recataloging

[gwshaw]

Sorry for the long story, but it has been a long couple of weeks...

 

I had a hard drive on the verge of failure and backed it up on 9/13 to a Maxtor One Touch II using Retrospect Express HD. The pair had been in use for about 18 months with 70+ restore points. Backups are typically weekly and typically small--500M to 1.5G. Total about 55GB. Since this was done with Express HD it is a single backup set.

 

After Installing XP SP2 on the new drive I did a restore but had some communication problems over the firewire connection, so I tried a very early session (about 2.5GB), but still had errors (3 or 4). I reinstalled XP SP2 and Retrospect Express HD while trying to investigate the firewire issues (at least a few times), and the system did an automatic backup on at least two occasions. I stopped the second backup while in process and deleted the two backup sets (one complete and the other partial). The catalog did not show the backups deleted so I did it again. The system did some backup maintenance, and after a while I noticed the number of restore point had dropped not from something like 75 to 73, but from 75 to 17! So, I stopped the maintenance. It took about 5 minutes to wind down.

 

The *.rdb file still exist on the disk, including the two I wanted to delete, but the catalog had no entries past July 2005. So, from info here in the forum, I deleted the catalog file and had it rebuild automatically. After about 3 hours I had a catalog with 71, restore points--missing the two I wanted to delete and the last two I wanted to keep. So I did not have access to the final backup on 9/13 or the one before that on 9/9. I have restored to another intermediate backup, but still with errors (typ 4 errors on non critical files as far as I can tell).

 

After much other fuss, I downloaded 7.5 in hopes that it might fix things better.

 

I disabled hardware that was not required (network and modem) that sat on the same interrupt as the firewire card and have since seen no communication errors. That appears to be solved.

 

In 7.5, when I recreate the catalog I get 23 snapshots in 74 sessions and it terminates in an error. Intermediate sessions are missing, again including the last two of interest (9/9 and (/13). Grooming is turned off usually (it seems to turn it self back on so I don't know where the option is stored), but the disk is only half full so it should not be necessary anyway. The error I receive is Can't Load Snapshot Tree -641 (checksum chunk did not match). I done the rebuild three times and it fails in exactly the same place each time, after 3.5 hours each. It should be right at the end, or almost.

 

Suspecting corrupted *.rdb files, I did a verify on the media and it has no errors. I tried an update on the catalog, and then only the final backup on 9/13 and one early intermediate backup showed up, but then the catalog has only two snapshots. Apparently the RDB file for 9/13 is okay since it showed up.

 

Using the 23 snapshot catalog I've restored the system to 9/3/2006. I saved off the catalog that showed 9/13 so I can get those files (but have not done that yet).

 

Each time in HD or Professional I've told the system to overwrite the entire C:\ drive, but I do not get a clean restore. At the very least the desktop is not correct at times with icons to programs or files that don't exist yet. At least one program file is missing.

 

So:

-How do I get a rebuild to include all the sessions and not just 23 snapshots? The RDB file dates indicate they have not been modified since they were originally written.

 

-Why are files missing? Do I need to start from a clean XP install again? I'd think if some files were missing from a restore due to errors they would just get restored next time.

 

-How do I get the system to actually overwrite the entire C drive? On the last restore it only loaded the files it found missing or had been changed. What if a file were internally corrupt but not marked as modified? Is the only way to make sure you actually overwrite the entire C drive to start from bare metal?

 

Thanks,

 

George

[nekr0phage]

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I stopped the second backup while in process and deleted the two backup sets (one complete and the other partial). The catalog did not show the backups deleted so I did it again.

 

 

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What exactly do you mean here, did you forget the restore points within HD or did you delete .rdb files?

 

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I disabled hardware that was not required (network and modem) that sat on the same interrupt as the firewire card and have since seen no communication errors. That appears to be solved.

 

 

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It's good that you've isolated the source of the problem, but you were still receiving errors during the last backup, correct?

 

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Grooming is turned off usually (it seems to turn it self back on so I don't know where the option is stored), but the disk is only half full so it should not be necessary anyway.

 

 

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In 7.5 this option will be on the properties for the backup set. Configure>Backup Sets>Properties>Options

 

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The error I receive is Can't Load Snapshot Tree -641 (checksum chunk did not match). I done the rebuild three times and it fails in exactly the same place each time, after 3.5 hours each. It should be right at the end, or almost.

 

Suspecting corrupted *.rdb files...

 

 

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This seems to be in line with error -641

http://kb.dantz.com/article.asp?article=6389&p=2

 

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Using the 23 snapshot catalog I've restored the system to 9/3/2006. I saved off the catalog that showed 9/13 so I can get those files (but have not done that yet).

 

Each time in HD or Professional I've told the system to overwrite the entire C:\ drive, but I do not get a clean restore. At the very least the desktop is not correct at times with icons to programs or files that don't exist yet. At least one program file is missing.

 

 

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With all the trouble you seem to be having with this backup set, it is understandable that some of the data may not be able to restore properly. At this point you might simply need to salvage what data you can and start over with a new backup set.

 

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-How do I get the system to actually overwrite the entire C drive? On the last restore it only loaded the files it found missing or had been changed. What if a file were internally corrupt but not marked as modified? Is the only way to make sure you actually overwrite the entire C drive to start from bare metal?

 

 

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Using the restore option "Rollback everything on Local Disk C:" in the restore wizard, or selecting "Restore an entire volume" when you switch to advanced mode will exhibit the same behavior you saw during your restores. Retrospect will not replace files that it finds to be exactly the same as files in the backup. The likelihood that a file would be different and not indicate this in one of the six attributes Retrospect uses for comparison is unrealistic.

[gwshaw]

Thanks for the comments. To address your points:

 

I "forgot" the restore points in Retrospect HD and did not delete the rdb files.

 

As it ends up, one of the backup files was corrupted and that generated the chunk checksum error. The verify media command only checks for readability and does not look at the data structures in the rdb files. I think it should verify the data. I would have solved this problem in half the time, and it would be a standard diagnostic step in the future.

 

I did not receive any errors during backups, just during restore. Backup were incremental for 18 months or so, so they were never more than 1.5GB. The restore had to process 60GB of files to get 27GB of data. I'm going to create an alternate hardware profile with the other interrupts off for doing backups and restores.

 

Retrospect prunes the catalog during a rebuild to contain only a subset of the sessions as snapshots. This should be documented, as well as clarifying that the other sessions can still be accessed even thought there are not snapshots for them in the catalog. The biggest problem I was having is that the last file of the next to last backup set was corrupted, so I could not get the last backup set at all (the session did not even show up).

 

I'm not sure why the desktop was corrupted (out of date stuff there). On the final restore, after I'd reinstalled XP SP2, I had a new problem with about 1300 "can't duplicate files XXX" where all the problem files were from my profile (typically, my documents). I did another restore into the existing system and that fixed it. I think it was becasue I unknowingly created XP with the only user/administrator as George when before there were users Administrator and George (both with admin rights). That should be noted in the docs.

 

Files that get corrupted internally can definitely be different without XP attributes indicating anything. Could be caused by a virus or a bad data transfer, etc. Overwriting files on content differences would fix these corruption problems.

 

Thanks for your comments.

 

George