[rescue] OT: Looking for an old version of Veritas Backup Exec

[Mr Ian Primus]

--- On Wed, 1/26/11, gsm at mendelson.com <gsm at mendelson.com> wrote:

> Another thing to do is to try to copy the files to a USB
> hard drive. I have
> had about 10% success restoring files from Acronis True
> Image from a DVD,
> but if I copy the files from the DVD to a USB disk, or a
> network share, 100%.

That's the problem. There are no files. I have the backup that's created by whatever horrid abomination of a backup program wrote it. It's a SINGLE file.  On a USB stick. I can copy it off, but I still can't parse it. It also appears to have some kind of internal compression (can't extract meaningful file names from it with the hex editor).

Apparently, they used to back up to tape - until the tape drive broke. Then they somehow told the backup program to wite to USB flash drives. So, now there is this little box of flash drives, all UDF formatted, and all containing exactly one giant file, called BACKUP.QIC.

Honestly, before seeing this, I'd not messed with Windows backup programs. Now I'm glad I don't. The version of Veritas Backup Exec that I found (version 10, too new), has the most brain-dead interface I can imagine. Furthermore, it relies heavily on "media sets" and all kinds of info about what tapes/files/disks are available, and there is no method to "read this backup tape and restore it" unless you've already got all the metadata for all your backups already loaded. To do a restore, you have to select files from the internal list, and select a media that it already knows about. This basically means that there is no way to recover from a disk failure, since, even if you did have all your data backed up in the proper format for this program, there is no way to restore it, since the clean install you just did on the new hard drive knows nothing about your backup sets, or what files it's looking for. I'm sure there has to be some method to do it, but
 still. It seems really, really back-assward.

Unlike a *nix system, where you can have the system back up and running by simply booting from floppy/CD/something and running 'restore'.

-Ian