roberson Posted January 22, 2010 Report Share Posted January 22, 2010 Hello, I was using an OEM Retrospect Express on Windows XP to back up my NTFS filesystems. My Windows system died a few months ago, and I am now attempting to restore some of the files on to a Mac OS-X Leopard machine. For this purpose, I have downloaded the trial version of Retrospect 8 for Mac, build 626 (which appears to be the newest.) Sorry, with the XP system dead, I can't tell what the original Retrospect Express version was. I was able to point Retrospect 8 to the appropriate catalog on the USB drive, and I am able to browse the files available for backup. However, I find that I do not seem to be able to restore any of the files to the OS-X disk. When I try, Retrospect appears to go through the motion, and in Activities counts up as if it is indeed restoring, but the files do not appear at the destination -- and the count is too fast to be realistic for restoring over USB 2.0 (and I don't hear the drive noise, so it isn't pulling files from the drive and putting them somewhere elsewhere than my selected destination.) The first time I made the attempt, the Log showed an error in creating a temp file on the NTFS USB file system before it started the restore count-up. I thence copied the Retrospect directory off of the NTFS USB drive onto an OS-X USB drive (9 hours of copying or so!), figured out how to purge the old media set information, and added in the OS-X filesystem copy of it. I was once again able to browse the catalog without difficulty, but unable to actually restore anything. With the restore points on the OS-X volume, I did not receive any error messages about having difficulty creating a temp file. I attempted Restore Volume; I attempted Restore Folder; I attempted getting right down to 4 files; in each case, no files were actually written to the destination OS-X folder, and the reports show no difficulties encountered. Is this task, restoring from a backup of an NTFS filesystem, over to an OS-X filesystem, possible with Retrospect 8? At the moment I am not concerned about the metadata; e.g., I am mostly attempting to restore JPG's I took with my camera. (Eventually I will build a new Windows machine, probably Windows 7, and will be wanting to restore complete file systems with metadata and all on to there, but that's in the future.) Regards, Walter Roberson Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted January 22, 2010 Report Share Posted January 22, 2010 The version of Retrospect Express may be critical to the answer. You are expecting that Retrospect backup sets are "cross platform", such that backup sets created by one version of Retrospect on one platform (Windows) are readable on another platform (Macintosh). That's not quite true. All of the Retrospect backup sets on the Windows platform are "compatible". For versions of the Mac Retrospect prior to Retrospect 8, the backup set format was "big endian" (PPC format, whether running on Intel or PPC Mac), and incompatible with Retrospect on Windows (Intel only). Retrospect 8 has made the format change to Intel native storage ("little endian"), and is rumored to be able to exchange backup sets with the Retrospecct Windows platform, perhaps now, perhaps in the future. I haven't tested. It's why Retrospect 8 can't even read backups made by older versions of Retrospect on the Mac platform. But that's not the same as saying that it can read a Retrospect Express on XP backup. You may be in uncharted waters here, and might want to contact EMC support: Contact EMC Retrospect support Your best approach, if you only have the Mac machine, might be to run Boot Camp on the Mac, install some version of Windows through Boot Camp, run a Windows version of Retrospect to access and restore the data. The first time I made the attempt, the Log showed an error in creating a temp file on the NTFS USB file system before it started the restore count-up. I thence copied the Retrospect directory off of the NTFS USB drive onto an OS-X USB drive (9 hours of copying or so!), figured out how to purge the old media set information, and added in the OS-X filesystem copy of it. I was once again able to browse the catalog without difficulty, but unable to actually restore anything. With the restore points on the OS-X volume, I did not receive any error messages about having difficulty creating a temp file. This is a different issue. You are aware that the Mac OS cannot write to NTFS filesystems without the addition of third-party addons, aren't you? Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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