Backup Set Catalogue Files Dissappearing

[GCSJoel]

Hi,

 

 

 

Why are various .cat backup set files suddenly dissappearing from the disk?

 

 

 

I am stumped.

 

 

 

Thanks,

 

 

 

Joel

[AmyJ]

What version of Retrospect are you using?

[GCSJoel]

5.0 for Mac.

 

 

 

I am really beginning to miss Veritas ... your product seems rather unstable, cumbersome, and inefficient. But oh well, the boss is a Mac Linux Freak so what can you do ...

 

 

 

 

[CallMeDave]

In reply to:

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I am really beginning to miss Veritas

---

 

 

 

This comment implies that you have a background in different operating systems then Mac OS X.

 

 

 

You give very little information about what you are experiencing, so it's difficult to help troubleshoot your install.

 

 

 

_Are_ you having trouble?

 

 

 

Do File Backup Sets you create suddenly stop working?

 

 

 

Are you familiar with what the .cat files are, when they are created, or why?

 

 

 

In the early days of Macintosh/Retrospect, File Storage Sets (as they were then called) kept everything in a single file. This included the Retrospect Catalog information _and_ the actual data that was backed up. Very nice, very elegant.

 

 

 

Dantz used the Macintosh's dual forked files to handle these two unique parts of information storage. Data (the actual information backed up) was written to the file's Data Fork, while catalog information was written to the file's Resource Fork.

 

 

 

This worked fine for many years within the limits imposed by the Mac OS's File System.

 

 

 

Resource forks were (and still are) limited to 16 Megabytes in a single file. But even with that limit, the amount of data that could be handled by a File Storage Set was large enough for most users (and the catalog compression feature could extend that by as much as 10x).

 

 

 

But as drive capacity has expanded over time, Retrospect users began to find that File Backup Sets (as they became known in version 4) couldn't handle all the data on their large modern hard drives.

 

 

 

In Retrospect 5.0, Dantz gave the program the ability to split what _had_ been a single file into two files, one to store the data being backed up, and one to store the catalog specific information.

 

 

 

The result is the Data part of the File Backup Set file is limited only by the file system, and while the .cat file is still limited to 16 megabytes of resources, this file stores data in both forks; the .cat file itself can be significantly larger then 16 Mb.

 

 

 

Retrospect will calculate the need to split a File Backup into two parts based on some needs test. Small File Backup Sets will not split, while larger backups will. You can also manually split and rejoin from Configure->Backup Sets->Options.

 

 

 

Retrospect does _not_ combine a previously split pair of backup files automatically. So the answer to your disappearing .cat files is not that they have become recombined on their own.

 

 

 

But Retrospect does not delete or move such files, either.

 

 

 

If you have files that you can no longer find I would suggest the cause is more likely human interaction then computer code. Are you sure you didn't move them yourself?

 

 

 

Dave

[GCSJoel]

The cat files just dissappear. Files are not being moved around, so its a mystery to me too. Go figure. Thanks for the dissertation though. PCs will always be my HW of choice. Macs are toys. I love s.p.jobs though ...