Damaged media due to wrong disk name…

[Saittam]

This is a solution to a problem I had recently.

 

If you, for some reason have the wrong name on a disk on which your backup file resides, Retrospect can not rebuild your catalog file. If you try simply nothing will happen, or almost nothing, Retrospect will remember that this disk has "damaged content". By clicking "Devices" as you do when you prepare media for backup sessions, the disk in question will appear with the label "Content damaged".

 

On one of the Retrospect support pages the advice is given that you should rename your disk to the name initially set. But what if you don't remember that name? If you're trying to rebuild the catalog file, you might be doing that because you don't have a catalog file any more, and without knowing the name of the catalog file it's difficult to guess what the name should be.

 

The solution is to look inside the backup file. Now, since the backup file probably huge, in my case it was 232 GB, normal text editors might fail in trying to load the file. If you're on a Mac, open the Terminal and type

 

head <filename>

 

(if you, like me, don't want to write the filename type "head" and <space> and drag the file to the terminal window)

 

then press enter and you will get a result similar to

 

???? ????1-Backup Set AcynoSgmt?......... etc

 

Now you know that the disk should be called "1-Backup Set A"

 

PS

If you're using hard drives as backup media, remember to change the preferences of Retrospect so that it can treat hard disks as removable media

DS