Backup Exec disaster recovery after flood

External Since: Dec 02, 2003 Posts: 3

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

External Since: Nov 26, 2003 Posts: 37

On Tue, 2 Dec 2003 13:12:32 -0000, "Mike"
<mike.dont RemoveThis @spam.me.penfleet.dircon.co.uk> wrote:

>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.

Backup Exec has a number of limitations that you have observed. The
proper restore procedure is to install the program on a working system
and use that to extract the data you want from the backup archive.
Once the program is installed, you can browse the archive with a GUI
interface and select the files to restore.

Since you don't have the program disks and the product is
discontinued, you are in a bit of a jam. The successor to Backup Exec
is a program called "BackUpMyPC" from Stomp software:

<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.stompinc.com/bump/bump-retail.phtml?stp" target="_blank">http://www.stompinc.com/bump/bump-retail.phtml?stp</a>

I think the odds are pretty good that it will read the archive from
the older version of the program. You can download a trial version or
contact Stomp to see if it will restore from your existing archives.

- -
Gary L.
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