I had a strange problem today… I was asked to visit a client who were running low on disk space to see what I could do.
Whilst there I discovered the root cause of the problem was that their online backup software Attix5 was creating a cache of all files to be backed up online on the C: drive, thus chewing up all the spare disk space.
After plugging in an external USB hard disk and moving the cache to that drive I thought I might as well try and free up some more space for good measure.
After deleting all Windows Update files, temp files, Internet Explorer temporary Internet files etc I still had a measly Gigabyte of space left, which I thought was not really enough.
After looking through the system drive with a fine tooth comb I made the decision to delete some large Symantec Backup Exec Catalogue files.
Whilst at site I was asked to restore an important file that was accidentally deleted very late on Friday night…
I checked Friday nights backup, which had worked perfectly, and began to try and restore the required file…
I clicked on the restore tab, selected media view, selected Fridays tape and started to browse to the directory where the file to be restored was located. However, I was unable to browse any files on one particular partition, typically the one I wanted.
I figured this was because I had deleted the catalogue files earlier so began a new catalogue on Friday’s tape (Lasting 40 minutes).
After the catalogue finished successfully I restarted the backup exec services and tried to browse to the file I wanted to restore in the same way as mentioned above…. no joy… I still couldn’t browse any files on that partition, even after the new catalogue job…
After speaking with a couple of friends and trying a few things, I browsed to the catalogues directory…. deleted all catalogues, restarted the backups exec services…. re-catalogued the tape (another 40 minutes) and then restarted the services again…. this type (thankfully) I could see everything on the tape and 10 minutes later my missing file was back where it belonged.
Moral of the story: Make your system drives large (50 GB should do it), don’t delete catalogue files unless you really have to, if you have a problem, delete them all and re-catalogue.