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

[JJ Streicher-Bremer]

Couple of things here.  To my understanding the backup solution included in
Windows (up until the abomination included in Vista/2008) was based on "Backup
Exec", originally from Arcada.  Arcada was purchased by Segate then sold to
Veritas.  This same software was rebadged by many different vendors and
bundled with lots of different tape drives out there, so it's likely this is
where the backup file came from.

As to restoring, there are a couple of things you can try.

1) install a VM with Win98 and give the restore a shot.  The worst thing that
can happen is the data doesn't come back
2) install a VM with NT4 and give the native backup product a shot.  I don't
know but it _may_ be able to read/restore the file too
3) I've got a copy of Backup Exec 8.6 which, I believe, may predate the
Veritas acquisition but I'm happy to make it available to you.  It will run on
NT and Netware 3.2/4.2 (IIRC).

Let me know and GOOD LUCK!!

------------------------------

Message: 8
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 06:31:29 -0800 (PST)
From: Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com>
To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Subject: Re: [rescue] OT: Looking for an old version of Veritas Backup
	Exec
Message-ID: <656056.40390.qm at web121608.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

--- 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