M
Mike
Can anyone advise me about disaster recovery of Backup Exec files?
A small charity whose PCs I look after recently had its office flooded by a
burst water main. The PC was destroyed, and the backup CDs (which were
unfortunately kept in the same office) were immersed.
I managed to retrieve most of the backup CDs while they were still wet,
swilled them with clean water and let them dry. They seem to be readable,
but are in the proprietary backup format.
We were using 3-year old version of Backup Exec desktop edition. I have a
full backup (disaster recovery set) from about 18 months ago, together with
some of the daily incremental discs from the intervening period.
We are left with a number of problems:
1) I am not sure whether the disaster recovery set was meant to be bootable,
but if so I haven't succeeded in booting from it. (I tried this on my Sony
Vaio. The original PC was a Dell.) I also can't remember if I made boot
floppies, but, if so, they're gone anyway. The first CD has a "Readme.txt"
file, which I can read, but this just says the disc must be used with
disaster recovery software.
2) The installation discs for Backup Exec were lost. Veritas now only seem
to offer Backup Exec for Windows Servers, which costs about 10 times as much
as the desktop edition we bought originally. I have seen some Orlogix
products "powered by Veritas". Would they be able to read our old Backup
Exec CDs?
3) Even if we could do the full disaster recovery, the old PC had Windows
98, but the replacement will have XP. We don't particularly want to restore
an exact disc image, just retrieve the data files. Would this be possible?
Obviously, we will be improving our backup procedures for the future, but I
would really appreciate any advice about salvaging our old data.
Mike Redmond
A small charity whose PCs I look after recently had its office flooded by a
burst water main. The PC was destroyed, and the backup CDs (which were
unfortunately kept in the same office) were immersed.
I managed to retrieve most of the backup CDs while they were still wet,
swilled them with clean water and let them dry. They seem to be readable,
but are in the proprietary backup format.
We were using 3-year old version of Backup Exec desktop edition. I have a
full backup (disaster recovery set) from about 18 months ago, together with
some of the daily incremental discs from the intervening period.
We are left with a number of problems:
1) I am not sure whether the disaster recovery set was meant to be bootable,
but if so I haven't succeeded in booting from it. (I tried this on my Sony
Vaio. The original PC was a Dell.) I also can't remember if I made boot
floppies, but, if so, they're gone anyway. The first CD has a "Readme.txt"
file, which I can read, but this just says the disc must be used with
disaster recovery software.
2) The installation discs for Backup Exec were lost. Veritas now only seem
to offer Backup Exec for Windows Servers, which costs about 10 times as much
as the desktop edition we bought originally. I have seen some Orlogix
products "powered by Veritas". Would they be able to read our old Backup
Exec CDs?
3) Even if we could do the full disaster recovery, the old PC had Windows
98, but the replacement will have XP. We don't particularly want to restore
an exact disc image, just retrieve the data files. Would this be possible?
Obviously, we will be improving our backup procedures for the future, but I
would really appreciate any advice about salvaging our old data.
Mike Redmond