[birdman]

We have an XServe at work set up to share files over our local network. Each night, the XServe's hard drive is backed up to tape via Retrospect 5.1.

On several occasions, I've needed to recover a file that was accidentally deleted. This should be simple, right? Just go to yesterday's tape and retrieve the file.

But I'm no expert with Retrospect, and I've tried to grasp what I could from poking around in the program (and we had another company install the system, so I was never formally trained in restoring, only in changing the backup tapes). The way to retrieve a deleted file seems to be: put in yesterday's tape, go to the Immediate tab, click Restore, select Files and Folders... then you have to "rebuild" the "backup set" from the tape you just put in the drive, which takes several hours, in order for the deleted file to show up in the file list. THEN you can restore.

It sure would be nice if you could just put the tape in, have Retrospect give you a list of files in a hierarchical fashion like a Finder window, then let you select the files you want and restore them. This rebuild-the-backup-set nonsense takes hours and is a lot of screwing around just to get one stinkin' file.

Is there a quicker way?

-birdman

[David Thompson]

If you're not keeping the backup catalog on disk for the corresponding tape backup you'll have to do process the whole tape to recreate the catalog before a restore can be done. The catalogs don't require THAT much space on disk and it sure makes it a LOT easier to recover files.

[C.J. Moof]

Immediate: Restore: Search Files and Folders should then bring you to the "Backup Set Selection" dialog where you select the name of the backup set. If your catalog isn't there, the More button will take you to a dialog where you can show it where the catalog is.

Catalog files are Retro's index of what is where on tape. It sounds to me like yours doesn't know where to find the proper catalog.

[birdman]

Hmm, I'll have to check the setup when I get time, but I recall that there only seemed to be one backup set (Set A), and it had numbered them like Backup Set A-1, Backup Set A-2, etc (there are 5 tapes). Yet there's only one backup file (Backup Set A), rather than five. I wonder if it's just overwriting Backup Set A each time... but then it should match yesterday's tape. Well whatever, I'll take a look at it. Thanks for the tip.

-birdman

[C.J. Moof]

That's normal. My current backup set spans 12 tapes, 860+ gigs, and it's all organized in one catalog file. It's not overwriting, it's appending.

BTW- once you get your catalogs under control, I recommend using Retro to duplicate your catalogs to another location, as you know what a drag it is when the catalogs have to be rebuilt. My retro setup includes a daily 5AM duplicate to a set of folders on another machine, named Monday through Sunday. If my backup server croaks, I just need to restore and grab the catalog from the other machine, as recataloging a dozen full AIT-2 tapes is more downtime than I'll accept.

[birdman]

OK, I did an Immediate Retrieve by Search for Files and Folders, found the files I wanted. The problem is, it's only giving me the option of retrieving from Friday's backup; I need a file from Thursday's tape instead. If I go to Configure, Backup Sets, Configure... Snapshots, it shows one snapshot, from Friday's backup. So I tried clicking Add, and it claims it's "retrieving snapshot from media..." but it's not actually doing anything or accessing the tape drive.

As far as I can tell, this is what I want to do in order to make Retrospect retieve a file from Thursday's tape instead of Friday's, but it doesn't seem to be working. But then again, on Friday it wouldn't even let me search the catalog but today it will, so maybe I should just try the exact same thing later and it will magically work properly.

-birdman

[C.J. Moof]

How many backup sets are you working with? I fear you're using one set and overwriting it each day with a new tape, hence your Thursday and Friday tapes.

If that's the case, you're overwriting your backup catalog every day, which means you now don't have yesterday's catalog, leading to your original problem of needing to rebuild a tape's catalog every time. That's FAR more work than necessary, and very inefficient.

What you need is one backup set that runs every day, where it appends to what was stored before. Retro has a smart system where it only has to back up what's different than the last time, so the first backup takes a while, but later ones move much less data. A tape being full dictates when it's time to change tapes, not the day of the week.

[birdman]

Just thought I'd resurrect this thread to give an update. Two of our backup tapes broke (I assume the tape itself snapped), so I figured it was time to replace the rest of them too. We bought five backup tapes, and I labeled each one for a day of the week. Then I created five separate backup sets, also named for the days of the week, and they're only scheduled to run on their respective days.

Today was the first day I've had to restore a file, and it worked like a charm: all I had to do was choose the backup set from which I wanted to restore (in this case, yesterday, Thursday) and select the file. No more set rebuilding! Plus, I no longer need to launch Retrospect and erase a tape each day; I simply put that day's tape in the drive and it overwrites it (and it won't attempt to keep using the tape if the name doesn't match, for example on Thanksgiving, it didn't attempt to overwrite the Wednesday tape that was left in the drive).

It also allows me to continue taking a tape home each day for off-site storage (which, as far as I can tell, is why a differential backup wouldn't work, because it would want all members of the backup set when restoring files).

Thanks for the help, Moof.

-birdman


Edited to add: For what it's worth, the company we hired to set up the backup system in the first place (with the erase-each-day/rebuild-when-you-need-to-restore) went out of business last year.