## Warning ## Retrospect erased my hard drive

[jsobel]

I wanted to do a complete copy of my hard drive to another local disk before upgrading to 10.5.8.

 

I therefore made a "Copy" script, to copy "All Files" with "Thorough verification"

 

This worked well, but then after the normal copying and checking, in the "Status field" in the Activities window of the script I suddenly read:

 

Status: Erasing MacPro....

 

And sure enough, it erased my hard drive.

 

I think it might be due to the fact that I had checked "Move files" under the script "Options", but I'm not sure what this options does. At any rate, I didn't expect it to erase my hard drive after the backup.

 

If this is indeed what the option does, I think it should be removed. There is the "Archive"-type script to do this type of data moving.

 

If the "Move files"-option is not the culprit, I would be grateful to know what could have caused Retrospect to erase the source in a Copy-operation before I try again.

[Tree]

"Move Files" does indeed erase the original file after it has been copied (and verified) to a new location, and I think the program is good about alerting you to this. To fix this, probably all you need to do is the same Copy operation in reverse, this time without the "Move Files" selected, to recover your hard drive's contents. However, I'll let others weigh in on whether this is the best method, as there might be issues with file permissions, etc.

[jsobel]

Thank you for your reply. I have been able to recover without any real problems. However, I wanted to know why it happened and perhaps warn other users.

 

"Move Files" does indeed erase the original file after it has been copied (and verified) to a new location

 

Where did you find this information?

 

" and I think the program is good about alerting you to this.

 

I didn't see any warning. How does it alert me?

 

Don't you thing it is dangerous to have this option in a "Copy" script. After all there is the "Archive" script.

[CallMeDave]

I think it's a powerful feature to have, but the wording should probably match what's used in the Archive Options:

 

"Delete source files after copying and verifying"

[Tree]

jsobel -

 

Sorry! You're right, R8 doesn't ever tell you that "Move" means "erase the source"... I must have been thinking about an older version of Retrospect (I've been using it since 4.1). I skimmed through the Getting Started guide thinking that I'd find the term "Move" defined, or described as a script option, but nope, not there. And if you click the radio button that is labeled only as "Move" (no explanation at all!) there is no alert or confirmation, which seems ridiculous considering you are thusly instructing it to destroy data. Seems like a data backup program should make you jump through many more hoops before data gets erased, anywhere.

 

From my skimming through the Getting Started guide, I love what I found on page 18:

 

The Backup script category contains the following script types:

• Backup copies files from one or more sources to a destination Media Set. This is the most common Retrospect operation.

• Copy operations duplicate files from a source to a destination. In previous versions of Retrospect, this was called a Duplicate operation.

 

So, "BACKUP" copies files, while "COPY" duplicates files... and they felt they had to change the name to "Copy" for what reason? It's a park-on-driveways, drive-on-parkways kind of thing I guess.