Successful restore, no errors but restored volume is reported smaller by several GB

[tortoise]

OK I am utterly confused, when I install Retrospect 6.5 for clients I usually create a Disaster Recovery CD and using a spare HD I run a full restore to test the integrity of the back-up. After doing the test I invariably get a successful completion with a clean log free of errors and all appears normal but looking at the size of the original HD compared to the size of the restored HD there is a major reduction in size. My backup sets are also correspondingly smaller. The most recent example is a 40GB HD in a Dell laptop, original drive had 7.48GB used and 29.7GB free, my first full backup set (with no compression selected in Retrospect) came out around 4.68GB in size and doing a full restore the new HD also has 4.67GB used and 32.4GB free. There are no error reports and everything appears normal and complete but that is somewhat difficult to be certain of with thousands of unfamiliar files. I have experienced this several times and never heard a word of complaint from clients about missing files when unit is returned with smaller size (but I suspect many clients have files they might not notice). With this most recent Dell laptop I have run a full CHECKDSK including repair errors and verify free space and got clean reports back on both drives and no changes in reported size of files. This was a Windows XP home edition and both drives are NTFS. There must be something I am overlooking in the setup for the backup but I can’t imagine what, I used the defaults on this one, selected back up all files and let it rip. I am not comfortable with this large reported difference between original volume and restored volume. Any suggestions or information to resolving this issue will be greatly appreciated.

[tortoise]

Updating my efforts, went through the individual folders and files at the root of C drive with both drives installed and recorded the size and file count for each item, they are almost identical and both totals would lead one to think that the reported 4.68GB used is the accurate figure and the 7.48GB is inaccurate. The drive showing 7.68 is the new drive that was created using the Dell restore CD’s all the way from scratch and it has been running fine. Adding up the folders and files on it come close to 4.68GB rather than 7.48GB, while the other drive that is reporting 4.68GB is the drive that was created using disaster recovery CD on a new install of Retrospect 6.5 and a fresh virgin back-up, making me wonder if this is some sort of bogus reporting error by Windows XP rather than anything to do with the Dantz product. Heaven knows Windows has its share of errors, I just need to get to the bottom of this because I have another job coming up where there is no room for error.

[tortoise]

More updating, got an accurate file count via Norton optimizer; the original HD had 40,799 files and 938 folders. The restored HD has 26,867 files and 768 folders and the Retrospect logs for this operation reported 29,296 files backed up. So what happened to the missing 11,503 files and 170 folders?

 

Just out of curiosity I moved to my own PC with Windows XP pro installed and no Dell garbage to confuse the issue. Did a get info on my drive the capacity is 37.2GB, with 21.2GB used and 16.0GB free. Norton optimizer file count for this drive is 52,539 files. Then launched Retrospect 6.5 with the latest updates and drivers and created a new backup set for my drive then set up a new back up and ran the preview to see what it said it will do. Similar results, it shows 43,051 files marked totaling 8.9GB and that is pretty much in line with an actual backup I did a few days ago on this drive. So in this case 9488 files totaling 12.2GB are going to disappear in the back up.

 

There must be something basic I am overlooking but I can’t seem to find it?

[natew]

Hi

 

I know this is obvious but did you do the backup with the all files selector enabled in Retrospect?

 

There are some files excluded in backup but those are regenerated by the OS after a restore. Do you have any duplicate files on your machine? Retrospect will only backup an identical file once. Upon restore it will copy it to the appropriate locations as many times as necessary.

 

Nate

[tortoise]

Hi Nate thanks for the reply;

 

Yes the “all files“ was selected and I have run several backups on different drives with similar results. I suspect that this is some procedural misunderstanding on my part because all of the restores have been successful with no reported errors and everything appears normal after the restore except for the difference in size and file count on the restored drive compared to the original drive. I am going to contact Dantz today as I am within 15 miles of their location and see if I can get this sorted out.

 

I could understand these differences in the preview pane as being related to the certain files recreated by the OS and some duplicates but once a restore has been completed and I am actually comparing the contents of the original drive to the restored drive missing 3GB of space and 10,000 files is still a giant mystery to me that I need to resolve once and for all.