DOTPACK Posted September 26, 2007 Report Share Posted September 26, 2007 Ok here is the deal we backup all our files to dat tapes using retrospect. We probably have close to 50 tapes full of art files. The computer that we were running our retrospect on, the hard drive died. So here is my problem we now have that computer up and working with a new hard drive and retrospect 6.1 laoded (mac Version) but all my scripts are gone so how do I restore files from these tapes? Maybe this is really simple or maybe not but I can't figure it out. Does anyone out here know how to help me please???? This is acutally for my job and I am so frustrated cause I need art files of these tapes. Thanks. Kris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted September 26, 2007 Report Share Posted September 26, 2007 Quote: The computer that we were running our retrospect on, the hard drive died. So here is my problem we now have that computer up and working with a new hard drive and retrospect 6.1 laoded (mac Version) Kris, It's a little unclear from your post where you are in the process and what your goal is. The problem is, the steps depend on exactly where you are and what you want to do. First, it's not clear whether the hard drive that died was your boot drive. If it was, make sure that this drive has been updated with all of the Mac OS updates (use Software Update) to bring it up to the same level that it was before the drive's demise. Second, it's not clear whether you have just installed Retrospect 6.1, or whether you have also installed the Retrospect Driver Update (RDU) too. That's needed as well; do that if you haven't already done so. The RDU versions are here (most recent one is at the top): RDU version history Make sure you have the most recent version of Retrospect installed, too, rather than the version that came on your install CD/DVD. Here is the most recent version: Retrospect updates Third, it's not clear whether you are trying to do a restore of your boot volume or just retrieve some files off of the tapes. Regardless, in order to get anything off of the tapes, you will need the catalogs for the backup sets. Do you have those catalogs backed up somewhere (other than on the tapes)? If not, your first step will be to rebuild the catalogs. The steps are given here: Rebuild Catalog tutorial Once you have the catalog for your backup set, you can then restore files from any snapshot (probably you want to use the most recent snapshot). Finally, here is the manual. It may help. Retrospect 6 Mac Users Guide If you still have problems, post and we'll try to walk you through it. Russ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted September 26, 2007 Report Share Posted September 26, 2007 I'd also note that from what I understand, DAT is not the most robust physical format for long term storage (unless it's improved from the devices I had a decade ago). If you've got valuable data, you should consider having additional archived copies on more stable media, such as optical disks (from high quality blanks). Just my opinion... Dave Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted September 26, 2007 Report Share Posted September 26, 2007 We have Retrospect DAT tapes back to 1992, and have never had a problem restoring from them, but, then again, we don't reuse tapes and archive them when they fill. We switched to VXA-2 when we migrated to OS X. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted September 26, 2007 Report Share Posted September 26, 2007 Mebbe it's all in the mechanics, then. When I was doing support at a large biotech here in the Bay Area, we went through numerous DAT products (Tandberg OEM, IIRC, inside robust APS cases (they had the coolest stackable SCSI connectors for them)) when they just failed to read or write anymore. Gave me a bad taste for the format, especially when compared to something more robust like DLT. Dave Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOTPACK Posted September 27, 2007 Author Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 RUSS, Thank you for your help. I am sorry my first post was unclear. Basically I have done all the updates to both my computer and to the retrospect software. I also had tried to rebuild my catalogs. I tried again last night following the PDF on how to do it and am still having a problem. Everything goes okay until retrospect starts to rebuild the catalog and then it just sits there never completing any files. I left one running overnight last night and came in thei morning and it was still saying rebuilding catalog but file completion still says 0. So I went back and looked at my log and I have tried 5 different tapes and they all say the same thing in the log. The message is Bad Backup Set Header Found (0x55d92f13 at 0). Have no idea what this means or what to do now. Any help would be great. Thanks, Kris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted September 27, 2007 Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 Quote: I also had tried to rebuild my catalogs. I tried again last night following the PDF on how to do it and am still having a problem. Have you tried using the steps in this article? Rebuild Catalog Seems that you might be hosed because Retrospect cannot read your backup tapes. Sure that they are Retrospect backup tapes? Looks like they don't have Retrospect's header on them. Are they members of the same backup set? Or, are they for five different backup sets? And, is it possible that you encrypted the backups and aren't supplying the right password? See the following article: Troubleshooting Bad Backup Set Header What version of Retrospect created them? You haven't provided any information about your hardware, and especially about your DAT drive. What type do you have? Have you tried cleaning the drive with a cleaning tape? Again, sure you've got the right backup tapes? I'd suggest that you write protect them at this point to make sure you don't inadvertently wipe them out. Russ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOTPACK Posted September 27, 2007 Author Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 Thanks again Russ for your help. Yes I followed the Rebuild catalog guide and no luck. To answer your other questions The Tape Drive is a Compaq DAT, SCSI-A:6:0. The tapes are definetly created by retrospect. My company has been using retrospect to create these tapes for the last 10 years so they are all created by different version. The tapes were working fine until my hard drive crashed and I had to reload retrospect and the driver onto another hard drive. This is when my problem started. And the 5 different tapes I tried are all from differewnt back-up sets. We have some tapes that were made by sony, some made by imation and some by hewlett paker but all are the same kind which is DDS 90 meter Data Cartridge. Lets see there was never a password set so that should not be the problem. And I dont know how in the world 50 plus tapes could all be bad when they all worked fine a week ago before I had to change hard drives and lost all my catalogs. So I am not sure what to do form here. If you have any other ideas please pass them along. Thanks, Kris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOTPACK Posted September 27, 2007 Author Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 Russ, Yes I followed the Rebuild Catalog guide and no luck. To answer some of your other questions. The drive we are using is a Compaq DAT DDS-DC, SCS:A:6:0. I am sure all the tapes were created with retrospect. As far as what version that varies some of these tapes are as old as 10 years so the versions very. The media use, we have sony, imation and HP but all are the same type of tape, they are DDS-90 4mm Data Tapes. I am pretty sure there is no way all of my 50 tapes are bad. They worked fine until we lost our hard drive with our catalogs on them. As for the 5 I tried they are all from different back up sets. These are tapes we used daily and had no problems with until my hard drive that was running retrospect died. The tapes are the same ones the drive is the same one and the version of retrospect is the same the only thing that has changed is the hard drive in my computer and the fact that I lost my catalogs. Any other suggetions as to what to do? Thanks so much for trying to help me. Kris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted September 27, 2007 Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 Quote: I dont know how in the world 50 plus tapes could all be bad when they all worked fine a week ago before I had to change hard drives and lost all my catalogs. One way 50 plus tapes could all stop working at the same time would be if the drive they're being use in went bad. If that were the case, then the fact that it happened when your hard drive crashed would be what is technically called a coincidence. Still, it's reasonable to follow other avenues first to solve the problem. But you have provided very little information about your setup, leaving readers to guess what's happening. You should have provided, in your very first post, a complete description of all the hardware and software being used. > we now have that computer up and working with a new hard drive and retrospect 6.1 laoded (mac Version) And how does this machine, whatever it is and however it's configured, differ from the machine you were using before? Dave Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted September 27, 2007 Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 Kris, Let's first try to establish whether the tape drive is working with your present system. (1) SCSI issues: You don't indicate whether there are any other SCSI devices on your tape drive's SCSI chain. You don't indicate how your "another hard drive" is attached to your computer. SCSI? LVD? IDE? ATAPI? etc.? You don't indicate what type of SCSI card is driving the SCSI tape drive. Some cards (Adaptec) are unsupported under Mac OS 10.4.x (Adaptec abandoned the Mac as of Mac OS 10.3.9). You don't indicate what type of SCSI your tape drive is. LVD? SCSI-1? SCSI-2? etc. You don't indicate whether you have all the proper terminators, cables, etc. You haven't provided information as to what type of Mac you have. I'm aware of an issue that we saw over two years ago, reported to EMC/Dantz/Insignia under our support contract, and that has never been fixed in Retrospect 6.x whereby something that Retrospect does in its initial device scan causes the system to hang if you have your SCSI boot volume on the same SCSI chain as your tape drive. I suspect that a bus reset is being done that causes an interrupt to be dropped or a transfer to be aborted for the boot / swap device. At least that's what we saw on our Xserve G5 with ATTO UL4D and our Exabyte VXA-2 1x10 1u autoloader (LVD SCSI). Only workaround we found was to put the tape drive on its own SCSI channel. There's no indication so far that this is your issue, but, because we don't have any hardware description of your setup, I don't know. (2) tape drive: get a new tape, define a Retrospect subvolume with a few files (say, your home directory Documents folder), try to back up a few files onto that tape then restore to a different folder. That will tell us whether the tape drive can read and write. When you did your backups previously, did you set Retrospect up to do a verify/compare pass after the backup had been done? That would give us some assurance that, at one time, the data was correctly on the tape. Quote: I am sure all the tapes were created with retrospect. As far as what version that varies some of these tapes are as old as 10 years so the versions very. Ok, then if the data is on the tape, and the drive is good, we should be able to get the files off. I am successful in using Retrospect 6.1.126 to restore files on DAT tapes that were made in 1992 using Retrospect 2.0. Please provide this additional information and let us know that you can write and read on a new tape. Russ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOTPACK Posted September 27, 2007 Author Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 Dave, It is a MAC G-4, it is the same machine that thr tape drive and retrospect was running on, as I have said before the only difference is the hard drive had to be replaced. Everything else down to the version of retrospect is the same. I do apologize if I did not provide you with enough information in my first post, I am a bit rattled over all this. Kris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted September 27, 2007 Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 Kris, We aren't trying to get you rattled. Really. We are just trying to get info from you and to help you through the process. Candidly, the time to try out the restore process is not when you have a crash, but it's too late for that now. Quote: It is a MAC G-4 Ok, which one? Which version of Mac OS X? And see other info that we need in my post above, plus the test that would be instructive to run (see if you can do a backup/restore to a new tape now). Russ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOTPACK Posted September 27, 2007 Author Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 Russ, Okay let me give this a shot As far as the hard drive there is only one. The hard drive that came with the macnine (Mac G-4) failed, crashed. whatever you want to call it so we ordered a replacement one. That is the only hard rive on this machine. The Tape drive is a SCSI-1. and yes all the proper cables and terminators are still in place as they were when everything was working fine. We have not changed SCSI cards on this machine so it is using the same one as before. Not sure where to look to be able to tell you the brand name of it. All I know is it came with the Mac. If you tell me where to look I will be glad to do that. The Mac I am running is a G-4 with version OS-X 10.2.3. When we backed up our files we did do a verify/compare pass on all back ups. And I just tried backing something up and then restoring it and that worked fine. So obvisoluy I am doing something wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOTPACK Posted September 27, 2007 Author Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 The restore of the files worked fine before we had the crash. We pulled stuff off tapes all the time to use. We could back up and restore with no problems. And no you guys are not he ones that have me rattled it is the fact that I have thousands of thousands of files of customers that I can not get to. I appreciate all the help. I hope I answered all the other questions in the post before this one Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CallMeDave Posted September 27, 2007 Report Share Posted September 27, 2007 The Tape drive is a SCSI-1. and yes all the proper cables and terminators are still in place as they were when everything was working fine. We have not changed SCSI cards on this machine so it is using the same one as before. Not sure where to look to be able to tell you the brand name of it. All I know is it came with the Mac. If you tell me where to look I will be glad to do that. - Having the make/model of the SCSI host adapter might be critical information. You can find information about it from the System Profiler utility located in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. > The Mac I am running is a G-4... - Apple shipped 28 different models of PowerMacintosh G4 computers, from August 1999 through June 2004. As with your host adapter, System Profiler will give you additional information regarding your hardware. > ...with version OS-X 10.2.3. - Is this the same version of OS X that you were using before? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted September 28, 2007 Report Share Posted September 28, 2007 Quote: The Tape drive is a SCSI-1. and yes all the proper cables and terminators are still in place as they were when everything was working fine. We have not changed SCSI cards on this machine so it is using the same one as before. Not sure where to look to be able to tell you the brand name of it. All I know is it came with the Mac. If you tell me where to look I will be glad to do that. Either choose "About this Mac" under the Apple menu, then "More Info", or launch System Profiler (in /Applications/Utilities). Then look at the information for "Parallel SCSI", report what you see. Quote: The Mac I am running is a G-4 with version OS-X 10.2.3. Ok, now we are getting somewhere. I've never used Mac OS X 10.2.3; we didn't consider Mac OS X ready for prime time until 10.4.4, and Retrospect 5.x certainly wasn't ready for prime time under Mac OS X. Quote: When we backed up our files we did do a verify/compare pass on all back ups. And I just tried backing something up and then restoring it and that worked fine. Ok, that's very encouraging. Sounds like you are working with good hardware, and that the data was good on the tapes at one time. Let's hope that the data is still there, and that someone hasn't put your tapes near a big magnet, and hasn't used them to record Bob Dylan. Quote: So obvisoluy I am doing something wrong. No, that's not obvious yet. Dave's question is very insightful. What version Mac OS X was on the machine before? And I understand that you are running Mac OS X 10.2.3 now. And how did you get the "other disk" to your current state of Mac OS X 10.2.3? And one more thing: Are you able to locate the "most recent" backup tape that was made on this drive? You say that this is the drive that was previously used before the hard drive failure. Is it possible that some of the tapes (you indicate that they go back a way) were made on a different drive whose alignment (or compression algorithm) was different? Perhaps it's something like software compressed data on the tape, and Retrospect doesn't realize it, or vice versa, or a compression algorithm from a different drive that this drive is trying to uncompress in hardware but can't, etc. Not quite sure how this is handled if you don't have a catalog - it's set on a backup set basis when the backup set is created and can't be changed for the backup set. When you put one of these tapes in the drive and do Retrospect's Configure > Devices, what do you see for the tape's name? What about the driver that Retrospect lists for "Device Status"? Russ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.