Dantz Retrospect erased my drive!

[uertzjl]

I was backing up some Protools sessions to my tape backup drive using Dantz Retrospect and it usually prompts me to "erase" a brand new tape before it will recognize it for backup. Well, when it prompted me to do this it selected the whole hard drive and erased it! Norton unerase couldn't find any of the files. Any suggestions????
Help!
Jamie [img]images/icons/mad.gif[/img]

[DaveCarlock]

WOW!! Sorry to hear of your bad luck! When I insert a new tape, it usually shows "Erased" where the name of the Storage Set usually appears. Then I believe I select "Proceed".

Perhaps you saw erase from another app and thinking it meant "Erased" clicked OK. I don't know what to suggest, but I can't imagine Retrospect erasing a drive.

Maybe you mistakenly chose a Hard Disk as the backup medium???

Man that bites!!

DC

[digiengineer]

If your drive hasn't been reformatted, you could try a Data Recovery company. The problem is, Data Recovery cost BIG $$$ and can't guarentee recovery at all. It has also been the experience of many people on the DUC that a recovered PT session may never play after recovery. But, if you have the dough, it may be worth a try. You can find Data Recovery services in the back of most computer magazines. If your internal HD has enough space, drag in copy of all session files before you back up.

I'm sorry this advise was too late, good luck.

[Avid]

You can also give Data Rescue a try, from our Downloads/Utilities section.

[Noiz2]

Do give Data Rescue a try. I fully recovered an accidentaly reformated harddrive, Norton could find nothing.
Good luck

[Jan Folkson]

This isn't the first time I've heard of this exact problem. Perhaps you should contact Dantz and make them aware of it. I can't imagine a situation where I'd want Retrospect to wipe a drive under ANY circumstances, so they should take that option out of their sofware altogether if indeed it is an option. If it's not then they've got some serious QC issues to deal with.

[vze24x2x]

Sounds like you weren't paying close enough attention to what was going on. when ever I Back up w/ retrospect, the window where you select your back up device shows the very drive that I want to back up. with a line of text underneath saying " contents unrecognizable" You can very easily accidentally select this drive and erase it. big drag.

[uertzjl]

Thanks for all your suggestions. I figured out that it did select my drive when it said," would you like to erase?" BUT, I tried it again on another drive, of course I didn't actually proceed with the erase, when it prompted me to erase it didn't give me the message, "Warning! You are about to erase the "80 gig HD" and all its contents! Would you like to erase the drive?
Instead it gave me, "Warning! You are about to erase the tape and all its contents! Would you like to erase the tape?" message.
So it was telling me that I was going to erase the tape, but I guess to the program the 80 gig HD got selected and it called that the tape!
Anyway, I downloaded Data Rescue 3.0 and it found and recovered all my Protools files beautifully! They all play back fine. What a great program! Disk Warrior didn't do s*@t!
[img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Jan Folkson]

Congrats on getting your data back.

Why would you expect Disk Warrior to help you, it doesn't recover data. All it does is repair directories (really well, I might add), you didn't have a directory problem. Disk Warrior was the WRONG tool, Data Rescue was the RIGHT tool. Knowing the difference can save your butt.

[uertzjl]

Jan,
Disk Warrior was recommended to me by friend who works with Macs a good bit. I guess he misunderstood what I was trying to do or I did a poor job expalining what the problem was.
I have also read on this conference people refering to it who have lost files and said they had sucess with it.
O'well, no matter now. It was a learning experience!