Restore problem, catalog error

[kyeoh]

Having used RE 4.3 for a year now to backup incrementally (with the current set about 20 sessions & 5 months old) for my iBook (Dual USB) 500 with OS 9.2.2, I have encountered a catastrophic drive failure, partially due to the fact that I couldn't get DiskWarrior to work. Anyway, I erased the hard disk, hoping to restore from the most recent backup from earlier in the day.

 

 

 

I reinstalled the original iBook OS 9.1 software, found that RE didn't work, & upgraded the OS until 9.2.2 & installed RE 4.3 with its latest drivers/extensions from the Dantz website. All this is on the internal 10GB hard disk, which is the disk I'm wanting to restore too.

 

 

 

I tried to rebuild the catalog file using my 18 CD-Rs in the set. A day or two later, the rebuild was complete, totalling 90,000+ files & 18GB or so of data. I figured this would be the total of all the sessions.

 

 

 

On attempting to restore the entire hard disk, though, RE scanned my hard disk in its current state & wants to restore it to a total of 18GB of data! With a complaint that there isn't enough room on the hard disk! I looked at the individual files to be restored &, sure enough, the total at the top is 18GB.

 

 

 

But, when I changed the restore option to restore just files & folders, & still selected everything in the pop-up window, it now only totals 9+GB of data. This is still more than the hard disk had on it at the last backup ('twas about 8.5GB).

 

 

 

I'm confused & lost. For some reason, RE seems to think that all 18 CD-R's are part of one backup set session. Yet, there were no duplicates in the list of files/folders.

 

 

 

What do I do now? I have no working catalog file. The catalog files were not backed up with the backup sets, by the looks of things, for whatever reason. How do I get my research data back? How am I even meant to restore to a hard disk that contains the startup system & the program that is doing the restoring?

 

 

 

Any assistance at all would be appreciated. My current project is due in 10 days & I have no access to my data.

 

 

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

Kwan.

[AmyJ]

The following Knowledgebasecolor=blue> article should be able to clear up what you're seeing:

 

 

 

http://63.95.223.84/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&preview=y&id=26719

 

 

 

Question:

 

 

 

I have a backup set containing 2.3 gigs of data. I recently formatted my hard disk into two HFS Plus (MacOS Extended) partitions; one with 3.5 gigs and the other with 1.5 gigs.

 

 

 

I wanted to "restore entire disk", selecting the 3.5 gig partition as the destination, but when I went to execute the restore, Retrospect displayed the message "really overflow the destination."

 

 

 

I questioned that display because the data to restore in the "Files Chosen" browser window was only 2.3 gig and I had selected an empty 3.5 gig disk as my destination. When I looked at the "Files Chosen" summary in the "Restore from Backup" window, it read 4.2 gigs selected for restore. That seems very strange to me. What is happening?

 

 

 

Answer:

 

 

 

Well, the reason is that Retrospect (for display purposes only) assumes that the HD was initialized in Mac OS Standard format. This means that each file is displayed using a 512k block allocation size when the disk is actually using only 7k (MacOS Extended volume) block size. This causes all of the file sizes to appear inflated. Because the the user really does have enough free disk space, it will be safe to ignore the "overflow the destination" warning and complete the restore process. Retrospect will write data until the hard disk reports it has no space remaining.

 

 

 

More details and screenshot examples on Allocation Block Size can be found at:

 

 

 

http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=26676

[kyeoh]

Many thanks. I will try that out.