PLEASE HELP!
Before my internal drive crashed about 3 weeks ago, Ghost 14 backed up data in C:\users\Cathy\Favorites (and its subdirectories) to an external drive, using Files and Folders Backup. These are precious files, and the restore creates hundreds (thousands?) of duplicates and with a messy, near-duplicate foldering structure. How do I restore the bookmarks to make them as much as possible like the structure that existed before the crash?
The details: The Files and Folders backup ran very roughly weekly since 2009. I did not "prune" it, so all of those backups are still on the external drive they were saved to. The backup job originally was very broad -- it covered various data drives -- before I scaled it back to cover basically just C:\users (& its subdirectories). In any event, the accumulated backups total about 450,000 "FBF" files, in about 1,500 directories, totaling about 550GB.
The little database of what was backed up when -- I assume this is catalog.dat -- was likely somewhere in \Program Files\Norton Ghost, but in any event somewhere on the drive that crashed. I thus used Ghost's "File | Import Backup Destination" on all these folders, as of a week ago. I then restored and thought all would be well. It was not.
Problem #1: This restore generated a huge number of near-duplicate folders and a huge number of duplicate files. For example, a folder that might have been ...\After-School now also appears elsewhere as \After-School Time and as \Archive\After-School. The same link appears in multiple folders. [There are even some links that appear in folders that they likely never were in. (For example, a link to a recipe might be in a folder for a vacation.) My guess is these duplicates track the various names and locations that Cathy gave the folders and files over a period of reorganizing them.
Problem #2 I had starting this weekend. When I again do the same restore, the restored files don't have any foldering structure whatsoever. These new restores have no folders for recipes, vacations, after-school, etc. etc. The same problem recurs when I use Advanced Search (to limit the restore by file date).
What are my options? (I didn't do a drive image of the C: drive.)
A. Would starting with a new catalog.dat, and then using File | Import Backup Destination on just the most recent "FBF" files, likely work? (I gather to start with a new catalog.dat, I should turn off the Ghost service, move catalog.dat to a safe location, and then turn back on the service.)
Does the Files and Folders backup do a full backup each time or just an incremental??
B. Would reimporting all the backups and then using Advanced Search for a recent date range likely work??
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If it's relevant at all, the backups were made using Ghost 14 under Vista Ultimate. I'm trying to restore using Ghost 15 under Windows 7 Professional.
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THANK YOU SO MUCH IN ADVANCE!