Rescue & Recovery: Where Is It Backing Up?

[ArtShapiro]

I've had the pleasure of enjoying my T42 for a few days - a noticeable upgrade from the T30.

Today, all of a sudden, the legendary R&R fired up. Sure enough, although it wasn't listed in the Windows scheduled tasks, it was configured to backup weekly at noon. So no complaints.

It cranked for quite a while. I see that it is set to backup to the hard drive, but I wasn't able to find any "mysterious" super-huge files on the drive. My 40G drive shows 37.5G total space (a little over 40 billion as an integer) so I don't *think* I have the hidden partition.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting at 9G of free space on the drive.

Can anyone tell me where it backs up files? I'd simply like to know how much space this facility is costing me. I can always backup across my network to a machine with more free space, but the program doesn't seem to be very well respected in this forum meaning another backup solution might be more appropriate. But first things first - learning what it's doing seems useful.

Appreciate any words of wisdom.

Art

[christopher_wolf]

Well that depends on the backup type it is scheduled to make. Most backups go into a folder, that is on the drive proper and has special properties within Windows, that is called "RRUbackups." On any HDD you have made a backup using the R&R software to, that folder gets created. Now, it is initially a hidden folder and, almost all of the time, not accessible to user I/O ops whilst the OS is running. Under your root, C:/, you should see a hidden folder called that; if you click on it, you will most likely get an "Access Denied" error. A bare view of the HDD in another OS, such as BSD or Linux, will reveal most of the structure of that backup directory.

Generally, again depending on the type of backup, configuration, and size of the system to be backed up, the backups can range anywhere from 3GB-8GB and they can get even larger.

[ArtShapiro]

Thanks, Christopher...I stumbled on that fact after I posted, but as you noted have no idea what sort of space is being used. As I have one three-gig file (that the IBM software suggested might be a good exclusion candidate, after the fact!) This alone has to mean that the backup is of nontrivial size.

The R&R software seems to have the facility of copying the backups to other media, so I think I'll network copy to my big desktop machine (with 600 gigs of disk) and remove the backup each week from the T42.

Art

[christopher_wolf]

I make backups to a 500GB USB MyBook and that has proven to be a very practical solution and networked drives work well too.

[GomJabbar]

You can peruse the C:\rrbackups directory (assuming it is on the C: drive) while in Windows SAFE MODE. You just have to make sure everything is unhidden in Folder Options to see the directory.

[wilo]

Hi,

just read this thread and wondering if it is safe to delete the
rrbackups folder from windows. (i hv checked and i don't see any rrbackups folder , will try again tonight from safe mode)

i did a backup to hard drive using Thinkpad R&R (old version probably version 2) and then without deleting the backup, I updated the TP R&R to version 3 which later i found out tat backup fm previous version R&R is unusable in version3.

so rather than letting the old backup take up 5GB of my hard drive space, i want to get rid of it.

any advice will be appreciated, thks.

wilo

[ArtShapiro]

-->
just read this thread and wondering if it is safe to delete the
rrbackups folder from windows. (i hv checked and i don't see any rrbackups folder Sad, will try again tonight from safe mode)

Well, as the original poster here, I'm obviously not an expert on the R&R software.

That being said, why not rename the directory (in safe mode) and see if the software subsequently functions as expected? If not, you can get out of the situation by obvious means. Otherwise, you'll be able to remove the renamed directory with a fair amount of confidence.

Art

[eTools]

You can delete backups in R&R under "Advanced". I wouldn't recommend manually deleting them fro your HD.