A couple of years ago I backed up to an external hard drive using an early version of Norton. The back up included some emails which had photo's as attachments. I can find the files on the external back up drive using my latest version of Norton 360 but it will not recover them. Any suggestions on how I might recover them? (I've tried Norton help but they were unable to recover the files)
I get a window with the message "Sorry some files could not be restored at this time, please try again later".
I tried using ARestore on the external hard drive, but it does not recognise(see) the backup set I am trying to restore from. (I can look at this set using my current version of N360 on my pc).
Hi zirconium40,
Is it only emails with photos that fail to restore?If so, do all the emails fail to restore or only a selected few?By any chance do you remember which version of Norton 360 was used to backup those files?
Thanks
I think it is everything in that backup set. I have just tried to restore a jpeg photo, which is not associated with an email, and a wmv music file, but I get the same error message. The restore date for the set is June 2008. The version of Norton will be for that year.
This was the first backup I did with Norton and I seem to remember that I tried to back everything up (not just a typical default set). i.e. I probably selected "back up c:drive" can't remember how this worked out. Has this caused problems?
Hi zirconium40,
Thanks for the information. Are you running the latest version of the product now i.e 20.2.0.19? (You can check this by clicking the support link on N360 Main screen and then hovering over About)
And,are you able to restore files successfully from any other backup set that were run on later dates?
Thanks.
A couple of years ago I backed up to an external hard drive using an early version of Norton. The back up included some emails which had photo's as attachments. I can find the files on the external back up drive using my latest version of Norton 360 but it will not recover them. Any suggestions on how I might recover them? (I've tried Norton help but they were unable to recover the files)
I am running the latest version of Norton (I renewed about 2 days ago). I can recover files from later back up sets. These were the more usual "default sets" of docs, photo's etc.
G'Day Zirconium40. I received your message, but thought I would reply here so everyone could see it.
I don't have a Norton backup set available for me to look at right now, as I have stopped using it due to the problems I had. But this is what I would try in your situation.
Identify where on the disk the 2008 backup set you wish to recover is. You should be able to tell by the data of the directory, or the name. If not, perhaps someone else around here who is still using Norton Backup can help work out where your 2008 backup set is. Check the directory size. It may be big, so you need space somewhere to copy it. Copy that backup set including all subdirectories to another location, preferably on a separate disk drive. Perhaps you have another USB external drive or something similar. Drives are cheap. Photos are priceless.
The reason for this is so that you don't damage the original set or any other backup sets you have in Norton, you can try one or more ARestore.exe version on it if required, and you can restore to that drive if you wish, to extract those important email files with attached images. (You should be able to open individual email files once they are restored, or open an Outllook pst file directly, for example.)
When you have copied the backup set files to the extra drive, put a copy of ARestore.exe in the backup set directory. I can't recall exactly the directory structure of a Norton backup set, but it has multiple levels. I think you need to put ARestore.exe into the same subdirectory as the backup.@db file. Then delete the backup.@db file from that directory, run ARestore.exe and wait until it tells you it is ready, or errors out.
If ARestore.exe is working it will take a while to scan the whole backup set, and will then display what is available to restore. On my large backup this took quite a while. If ARestore.exe just stops without displaying what can be restored, with or without error messages, then maybe you need to put ARestore.exe in a different directory, either a lower level subdirectory, or the parent directory to the one that originally contained backup.@db.
If ARestore.exe seems to try to work, but gives you the same message as before, you may need to get an earlier version from 2008 that is compatible. Norton may be able to help with that. I suspect though that the latest ARestore.exe is backward compatible with earlier backup sets.
That is my best idea on how to recover the files. Make sure you restore any files to a new location, not the original location. I would restore to the drive that you copied the backup set to, in a different directory, so that you can look through it and find what you need.
Note that when you restore using this method, having deleted backup.@db, the latest version of all files ever saved in that backup set are restored. So if you had a directory named "photos" which was backed up, then renamed that directory "home photos", then both directories will exist in the restored files and directories. Same thing happens if a directory is moved. Effectively you will have one directory with photos up to the first backup, and one directory with photos up to the last backup, and if you editing or deleted files in those directories between backups, files with the same name could be different in each directory. You will have multiple versions. I had a lot of this situation in my eventual restore and it took some time to sort it all out.
Good luck with trying this method. Hopefully all the data is still in your original backup set, so that it can be recovered. If this doesn't work you may wish to find a PC expert to try the recovery. Data Recovery companies are expensive, but a good PC guy may be able to get the files you need.
Thanks Roderick for taking the trouble to reply to my message. I'll try what you suggest and let you know how it goes. At the moment I do not have a spare external drive to copy the problem backup set to. I do have room on my pc's c: drive, am I likely to create problems if I copy and work on the backup set on my C: drive?
You should be fine if the copy of the backup set is on the C: drive, as long as it is in a separate, unrelated directory, and you run ARestore.exe from within that directory structure. I'm pretty sure that the program only looks for backup sets in the directory it is in, and sub-directories below that.
I was just being extra cautious suggesting a separate drive, to protect your original backup set.
Hi Roderick, I decided in the end to get a new external hard drive before I tried your suggestion for recovering my N360 backup files - which I now have. However, I don't seem to be able to try it because the backup set I am trying to recover from does not appear when I look for it on the old external hard drive using windows explorer in order to copy it to the new hard drive. I can see the 3 other backup sets on the drive using explorer.
The odd thing is I can see it using Norton 360, and I can see a list of all the files within it, but not when I use explorer. There is also something a bit odd about this because when I look at the sizes of all the backup sets on the old drive using N360 (3 plus the one I am having problems with) and then add them up they actually exceed the size of the drive (250 GB).
I cannot understand how N360 backup works in the way it creates its backup sets, and noone on google seems to know either. I am wondering if the problem has something to do with the directory structure associated with the files, although I don't see why it should, because I had to fit a new hard drive (C: drive) some time after creating the problem backup set, because the old one failed, and I then had to reload windows etc etc. Although this does not explain why it is invisible to explorer.
Food for thought? Have a good day - Zirco.