My backup never succeeds- now I need to Restore.

Question

I have been using PSE since version 3 and now use version 11. In all that time I have always had problems getting a backup to go all the way through to completion. I normally end up with the copied files as B???????.* and a catalog.buc file. No *.tly file.
Obvioiusly when I want to restore I cannot do it via the restore command because it needs the tally file.
As it happens, my current catalog includes multiple copies of some files on three hard disks so when one of my hard disks crashed all has not been lost.
I have tagges all the files that are on the crashed drive and then identified those with a duplicate elsewhere and those without. I now know that I need to recover about 1000 files and I think that most of them are on my backup set that has no tally file.
I know that I could go through the B??? files one by one and find the files but that will take a long time. Can anybody suggest a procedure to speed it up?

Answer 1

A more general question might be:
"What can you recover from an incomplete pse11 backup, where the backup.tly file is missing ?"
Note : I am convinced that the lack of the backup.tly file means at least a part of the media files have not been copied, and can't be recovered.
The good news is that the catalog.buc is a copy of the database, the catalog.pse11db file.
If you need to restore because the catalog has been messed up, you can always rename that catalog.buc and use it to replace the old catalog.
Now, one of your hard drive has failed. I suppose your backup is on an externel drive like J:
If your catalog is still valid (it was not on the failed drive), ok. Otherwise, rename and copy the catalog.buc to use it.
If you search for missing files, you'll find all the files which were on the failed drive.
Each missing file has a copy in the backup folder of your J: drive.
Is there a way to reconnect the missing file to the 'B0000...' file in the backup folder ?
Yes... but I don't see a way to do that automatically.
The reconnection feature lets you browse to your backup folder. It shows the icons of the corresponding files. The problem is that the automatic restoration process will recognize the file has been renamed and show a message requiring you to confirm the reconnection. You have to do that for each individual file. To reconnect 100 files is quite feasible, for 1000... you are right, that will take a long time.
If you succeed in this task, you may want to move the reconnected files from the backup folder to one of your internal drives.
For the reason you can't complete a full backup, the usual reason is the presence of unrecognized file types, mainly video.