C1533a disaster

[Mark Henry_2]

I had a problem with my DDS2 drive. Here is what happened:

During the preparation for updating my pc from WIN98 to WINXP, I decided to convert my hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS. Before the install, I backed up all of my documents (Word, Excel, family pictures, etc.) onto my DDS2 tape using MSBACKUP.EXE on the HP C1533a drive. There was about 1GB of data saved onto the tape. Once this was complete, I logged on to our email (Outlook) one last time and did some email archiving just to be safe. In order to be sure I had my latest Outlook archive.pst file, I fired up MSBackup again and made sure it saved the most recent archive.pst to the tape. Then I went on with the update to WINXP.

Once the WINXP installation was complete and all the necessary devices were recognized with drivers from the XP driver database, I went about loading the data from the DDS2 tape. I fired up the backup program that comes with XP (NTBackup?) and it only recognized one file on the DDS2 tape, archive.pst. Fear, panic, ensued. I loaded a copy of a Stomp backup program and the same thing, it only saw the archive.pst. To make a long story short, I believe when I went back that last time to make sure I had the most up to date archive.pst file, instead of â appendingâ to the media it â overwroteâ . The archive.pst was only about 40MB in size. That left 960MB in data that was still recoverable. My understanding is that the HP drive is similar to a hard drive in that it creates a table of files with their locations on the tape. If this is true then when I accidentally overwrote the 1GB with the 46MB, it should only have cleared out the table and wrote the first 46MB of tape leaving my previous 960MB of data intact.

This was really a nightmare for me. If only Iâ d had a CD R/W, I would have been able to backup to that. The DDS2 was my only backup media at the time. As well, if I had only update to XP and not switched from FAT32 to NTFS, again I would have been fine. The Word, Excel files etc. are not really meaningful, it was the family pictures (including pictures from the birth of our son) that really made this painful. My wife was incredulous about it for a long time. Obviously I donâ t mention this to her anymore.

If there is some way that I can retrieve this data, I would be extremely appreciative. Iâ ve looked into data recovery services. The prices range from $250 just for the analysis up to the several thousands of dollars. Who knows how much the actual recovery would cost.

If there is some way I can retrieve this data, I would extremely grateful.

Regards,
Mark
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[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
I think, you may be on the dark side of the moon. When you did the second backup ( just a guess ), your software was set to 'REPLACE'
instead of 'APPEND'.
So you shot the first backup with the second.
I do not believe, that you can retrieve the catalogue data from the first backup in order to restore at least some of it.
Perhaps some people here know some tools to help you.

Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes