Retrospect Express - HELP!

[dougnewman]

So, I've faithfully backed up my Mac every week or so with the EMC Dantz (or EMC, or EMC Insignia - I'm not sure what they really call it now!) Retrospect Express software that came with my FireWire hard drive from Other World Computing.

I never had to restore any data until now. My hard drive seemed to be spinning an excessive amount, so I tried Disk Utility to diagnose the problem. It said there was a problem, but it couldn't restore the disk. I backed everything up and then went to the Apple Store where the Genius told me that this meant I was having a hard drive failure. (He ran Disk Utility and got the same result.) So, a few days later, my lovely little 12" PowerBook is now back with me, with a brand new hard drive courtesy of Apple. The next step, of course, is to restore my data from that external hard drive - now, that should be easy, shouldn't it? After all, I backed up ever so carefully using supposedly industry-leading software...

After I set-up OS X and download all the software updates, I immediately install Retrospect Express and try to restore my data. But it tells me I have no catalog file - so I rebuild the catalog file. Great, now it can access the disk! But it tells me I have no "Snapshots", so I need to search for files or folders. I decide to start out with the Documents folder, but it says there's no such thing. WHAT?! So I figure out how to look inside the "Retrospect Dat" folder on the hard drive (it's the only thing there) and it tells me that there is... Well, nothing there. Precisely 65.05 GB of "nothing". Now, I figure there's got to be something there, since "nothing" can't possibly take over 65.05 GB. (Or at least I hope it can't!) But Retrospect insists that, no, there's nothing at all there. I try all the various troubleshooting steps, look through the whole EMC knowledge base on the subject, read the owner's manual, the FAQs, everything... But nothing gives me a clue on how to rescue all my "nothing" so I can get it on my new hard drive and get up and running again.

Can somebody please help me? What do I do? I'm loath to call up EMC's tech support since I don't know how much it will cost - I know it will cost something, but I don't know how much, and I don't want to start paying for stuff until I really have to. My next step, aside from posting here, is to call OWC's tech support - I doubt they can help, but maybe they can, and it's free. I'll keep you posted on that, but in the meantime, does anyone have any suggestions? I'm about to tear my hair out here!

 

[dougnewman]

Sorry, in my rush to ask this very urgent question I forgot to post that I am running Retrospect Express 6.1 on a 12" PowerBook G4 running Mac OS 10.4.8 with an OWC Mercury-To-Go 160GB hard drive (Hitachi 5K160) connecting using FireWire 400.

 

[opuslab]

When you installed Retrospect, the first thing you should have done was to "re-introduce" it to a backup set. Click on Configure tab, and then Backup Sets. If you don't see your backup set in the list, click More (not New!) and add it. Once this is done, click on Immediate tab and then Restore.

From there, Retrospect has three restore options:

-Restore an entire disk;
-Restore files from a backup;
-Search for files and folders.

Which one did you use?

 

[dougnewman]

Thanks, but I did that already. On my first attempt I hadn't, but then I went into the manual and I realized I had to. After I did that I that I thought I was home free - little did I know!

After I configure the backup set (and enter my password, since the data is encrypted), I get this:

Used: (empty)

Options: Normal, Separate catalog
Security: Password protected, Password saved for scripted access
Catalog: 1-Backup Set C: Retrospect Data.cat

Retrospect says it's empty, but if I Get Info on the disk (which has nothing but Retrospect Data and Retrospect Data.cat on it), OS X says there's 65.09 GB used.

 

[opuslab]

Oh man, I am afraid this doesn't sound familiar... I re-installed OS on my PB numerous times, and doing the procedure I described above always worked for me. Why was the .cat file missing to begin with? You know, if the missing data is important to you, you should consider contacting EMC support and let them help you. It shouldn't be too expensive. Please post the update if you can. Good luck!

 

[dougnewman]

I don't know why the .cat file was missing... It just wasn't there. Fortunately, it was able to build a new one, which I guess is pretty easy for it to do if it thinks there's nothing there. (It can't be too difficult to catalogue nothingness ...)

I'm going to contact OWC just to make sure they can't handle it, but assuming they can't, I'll contact EMC. Except of course that EMC Insignia will be closed tomorrow until 12:30 PST - they're moving their offices !

I hope it's not too expensive, but either way, I've got to pay it - that stuff is pretty important. (I wouldn't have backed it up otherwise.)

Thanks again for your help!