Help doing a complete restore

[PastorRob]

I had a major disaster on my hard drive. Top of the directory is messed up. I have some firewire drives that I was using for backing up. The drives have a file on them named 'Retrospect Data'. I've been trying to access them with no luck. how do I restore my drive using those files? When I try the Restore feature it tells me the catalog on the files is bad and tries to fix it, but can't because of an error (-61 I think), something about not being able to write to the file - HELP! Thanks,

Robert

[CallMeDave]

Quote:

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I have some firewire drives that I was using for backing up. The drives have a file on them named 'Retrospect Data'. I've been trying to access them with no luck.

 

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From the sound of things, you had configured Retrospect to treat Firewire hard drives as Removable Devices. This is not the default behavior of the program, so when you made this modification to Retrospect's preference settings it is assumed that you knew why you were doing that.

 

A Removable Backup Set stores data in a single file on each Member of the Backup Set ("Retrospect Data"). The Catalog is stored somewhere else, usually on the hard drive of the machine running Retrospect.

 

If drive housing the Catalog file is the one that's being backed up, you run the risk of loosing the Catalog file. So keeping copies of this file somewhere else is generally an important thing to do when using this sort of configuration.

 

You will need to Rebuild the Catalog file from the Members of the Backup Set. When you do this, Retrospect will give you the opportunity to chose a location to save the newly created file. Save the file on a location _other_ then on the firewire drive.

 

> (-61 I think)

 

Please don't make us guess. Provide the entire text of the error message when posting asking others for help.

 

Dave

[Mayoff]

Don't forget to set the "use hard disks as removable" in Special>Preferences>Media Handling to use a Removable Disk BU Set.

[PastorRob]

In my attempt to rebuild the catalog file, I got an error telling me it was the 'Wrong Version'. Is that because I'm using the Retrospect Backup disk as my startup? How do I get past this?

Robert

[rhwalker]

What version is on the Retrospect Backup disk?

What version was used to make the backup?

 

One way around it is to install a browser (you must have one if you are logging into these forums), use the browser to install Retrospect from the updates page:

Retrospect Mac updates

(you will need your license code, etc., and configure as desired)

 

then use THAT version to rebuild the catalog, then restore using that rebuilt catalog. All the Retrospect Disaster disk does is to help you skip a few steps before doing the restore, but you can still bootstrap yourself up using standard bootstrap techniques (wipe hard drive, install Mac OS X, install Mac OS X updates, install Retrospect, rebuild catalog, use newly-installed Retrospect to restore drive).

 

Clear?

 

Russ

[CallMeDave]

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you can still bootstrap yourself up using standard bootstrap techniques

 

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I'm not exactly sure what Russ is recommending, and of course without knowing version information it's impossible to give the best advise, but it's iimportant to note here that Removable Backup Sets are what the disaster recovery CD was deisgned to support. Those Sets may not allow a user to do a "Live Restore," as the OS driver software files that support mounting volumes get shunted (by Retrospect) to a temporary folder, which then makes them unavailable to the active system, which then results in an error. I know this is a deal-breaker when there are more then 2 Members, but I'm not 100% sure it's an issue with single Member sets.

 

Still, more information about available hardware and software in use would go a long way towards helping...