Q: Restore Boot Drive from Backup?

Question

I've used Retrospect for years with good results. On several occasions, I've needed to restore my boot drive from backup, and it worked flawlessly.
Not this time.
After the restore I can boot okay from the restored volume.
What's weird is that many of my preferences are gone! My dock has reverted to default (all icons I'd added are missing). When I view my "Account" in the System Preferences, my "Picture" is still there, but my Login Items are gone!
It would be easy enough to manually reconfigure these things. BUT this makes me wonder what else isn't being properly restored, that I may not stumble across for weeks, only to find that I've recycled my backup and can't do anything about it?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
-- Jim

Answer 1

You're welcome. As to your questions, by the numbers:
1. I don't know. I wasn't there to watch you perform either the Backup or the Restore. As I said earlier, and as confirmed by the responses received on the Retrospect forums, you went about the Restore by a convoluted method. I suggest you review the information concerning Restore in the Retrospect Users Guide.
2. Again, beats me. How would I know? I've never seen this problem, nor had the other Retrospect experts who responded to your post on the Retrospect forums. Technically, if you used Restore to "Restore an entire disk" then everything should have been restored from the Backup Set so that the restored disk reflected its state as of the last Backup.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you've been a bit "light" on details both here and in the Retrospect forums. It's impossible to perform a forensic analysis based on the limited details provided. If you try to jog your memory this long after the event, your recall may be imperfect. In your Retrospect forums post, you noted the possibility of "Probably an operator headspace malfunction."which I found amusing, but is often the case in trying to recreate what one did. Next time, take step-by-step notes.
If I had to guess, it was something in the process you used, i.e. the first failed Restore attempt from using the incorrect option, followed by the second correct attempt using "Restore an entire disk." You may have done things between those two attempts that led to the issue. WIthout a record, it's impossible to reconstruct the events other than based on potentially imperfect recall.
I generally recommend checking backups after they're performed. This is easily done with bootable Duplicates, since you can start up from them, look around, try a few applications. Since Backup Sets are not bootable, one cannot check them in this way. I recommend using a Safe Boot from the backup since, if you have Mail as a Login Item and new mail was received since you initiated the backup, then the new mail would be downloaded to the backup, which you'd probably like to avoid.
Using Retrospect's Verification option is also helpful. It increases the time required to perform a backup, since afterwards the destination files are compared against the source files, but it can let you know about problems, if any. Verification does yield some false positives (Execution Errors) on cache and log files (generally date/time or size issues), but these can be ignored for such files if you're performing a "hot backup" — backing up your startup disk while booted from such — as cache and log files on your startup disk are constantly being updated. The differences in such files are irrelevant w.r.t. the integrity of the backup. One can avoid these false positives by performing a cold backup: running Retrospect from another bootable volume, e.g. booting from a Duplicate of your startup disk to then backup your normal startup disk to another volume. In a cold backup, your normal startup disk hasn't been used as the startup disk, hence cache and log files on such aren't updated. Any execution errors you see then are worth examining in the Retrospect Log.
What I suggest you do is the following:
• Let sleeping dogs lie. Keep the Backup Set from which you restored the drive around for awhile in case something else turns up missing in the next couple of months, specifically personal data. Create a new Backup Set for future backups of the disk in question. Consider implementing bootable Duplicates in addition to Backup Sets.
• If the OS becomes problematic, perform an Archive and Install. For important tips on this, see my "General advice on performing an Archive and Install" FAQ.
• If any third-party apps become problematic, uninstall them, then reinstall them.
• If you're regularly having to restore your startup disk due to "corruption" there may be something amiss with the disk. Keep an eye on its SMART status by checking such in Disk Utility. For one approach to this with step-by-step instructions, see Steps 1 and 2 of the Procedure specified in my "Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption" FAQ.
Finally, you wrote: "P.S. - Apologies if this bothers anyone, but I plan to cross-post this to the Retrospect forum, since it appears to get a somewhat different set of users."It doesn't necessarily bother me, but cross-posting to a variety of different forums or Discussions is generally considered "very bad form" as one risks wasting some subset of responders' time. It's a "newbie" mistake and one does not want to gain a reputation for using the "shotgun" method.
Cross-posting is very annoying when one spend one's time answering a question in one place, only to find the same question posted by the same person on another forum and also answered there: one of the responders who answered the question in that exchange had their time wasted. Think how you would feel in the same situation.
When I found your post on the Retrospect forums (which is where the question really belongs) I almost skipped answering your question here for that very reason.
I think we're done here.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
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