nicdent Posted August 12, 2003 Report Share Posted August 12, 2003 I replaced my hard drive since it was about to fail, but didn't want to go through all my incremental back-ups (in fact I didn't have time). So I linked my computer to my home network, backed up the entire hard drive to a firewire drive attached to my Mac (my Windoze PC doesn't have firewire, and it struggles along on the network at only 100Mb/s) using the Windoze 2000 backup utility (I couldn't get Retrospect to back up over the network), installed the new hard drive then used the Windoze 2000 backup software to reinstall all the files and the system settings. That went fine, but now I have a hard drive (partitioned into two sections) with the same names for the drives and the same data as was on the old drive, but Retrospect 'knows' it is not the same drive. I ran my normal back up script and it said it couldn't find the drives. Re-creating the pseudo volumes I had makes it start a whole new back up from scratch. Is there any way of making Retrospect treat the new drive as if it were the old one? Was it because the partition sizes were not exactly the same, or is it checking other details off the drive? I assume there won't be a problem restoring files off my old incremental back ups, but it would be useful, and save time and extra CDs, if I could get Retrospect to recognise the drive as being the same as the old one. Anyone got any ideas? Thanks, Nic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted August 12, 2003 Report Share Posted August 12, 2003 If I understand you correctly, you have a physical hard drive that has two logical drives. In Windows, those logical drives are different critters and Retrospect would have to treat them as such. If neither drive is the boot/system drive, you can easily swap the drive letters. Say the drive letters are E and F: 1. Change E to, say, X. 2. Change F to E. 3. Change X to F. You can do this by right-clicking on My Computer, then choosing Manage, then Disk Management, then right-clicking on each logical drive you wish to change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted August 13, 2003 Report Share Posted August 13, 2003 Hi Retrospect references a drive serial number to determine if the drives "Match". I don't think Retrospect is going to try to copy everything but it will definitely want to back up a large portion of the data again. Unfortunately there isn't a very good way around this. You may have to bite the bullet and do a long initial backup. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted August 14, 2003 Report Share Posted August 14, 2003 If Retrospect is using the drive serial number to determine whether files match, in my opinion, that's not good. A set of files is a logical structure, based on a directory hierachy and the root of each drive. If I decide to copy all of a logical drive to another drive and then swap drive letters around, it is the drive letter assignment, most the serial number that determines whether files are the same. In general, users should not have to worry about drive serial numbers. Actually the concept of a drive is really obsolete. Each drive may be "mounted" as a directory in a hierarchy. The matching criteria needs to take into account the file's position in the hierarchy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted August 15, 2003 Report Share Posted August 15, 2003 Hi, I mis-stated some things in my last post. Let me clarify this a bit: Retrospect differentiates Volumes via the serial number not the individual files themselves. Chances are that your files now have a different modify or creation date now that they have been moved around from drive to drive. As such Retrospect sees them as changed. There are other factors that can affect matching like virus software and other utilites that "touch" files. You would have to do a low level bit by bit copy of the drive with Norton Ghost (or something similar) if you want to make sure the files are truly identical. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nicdent Posted August 15, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 15, 2003 Well, I thought by using the 'Backup' utility inside Windows 2000 and also including the system settings, it would leave the files in the state that Retrospect had last seen them. Either it didn't leave the files in the same state, or it has just decided that the hard drives are different (even though they have the same drive letters). It basically looks like I am stuffed now and have to do a large back-up. And even if I try to do the same thing again, I still won't be able to back up with Retrospect across the network; even if I do, it will probably take much longer than the 90 minutes it took using the Backup facility in Windoze 2000, and even then there is no guarantee that the next Retrospect back up will be just incremental, since all the files will be on a 'different' drive? Thanks for the feedback, though. Cheers, Nic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted August 18, 2003 Report Share Posted August 18, 2003 Retrospect uses several matching criteria to find new or changed files. If one of the criteria has been changed, Retrospect will back up the file again. On Windows, Retrospect looks at creation date and time, modified date and time, size and name. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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