Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Recovering BKF file in case of missing catalog files

The NTBackup utility is used to create backups in the Windows operating systems such as Windows Server 2003, XP, and 2000. It is particularly helpful when your system is somewhat unreliable and you fear that it may crash anytime. The backup is created in the form of BKF files. However, at times the bkf files can get corrupt due to various reasons such as human errors, virus infections, power surges, incomplete data backup process, missing catalog files, etc. To overcome such situations, you should take appropriate corrective measures. However, sometimes these measures are not adequate. In such cases, you should use a third-party BKF repair tool to repair BKF file.

Consider a scenario wherein you took concurrent backups of several locations simultaneously. When you wanted to restore the file from back up of the data, you were unable to do so. You were not able to view the catalog files in the Restore tab. These catalog files enable NTBackup to restore backed up data from the BKF file. This is apart from the fact that the backup operations are completed without displaying any error message. But when you try to restore the backup, an error message is displayed, which can be any of the following messages:

The backup file contains unrecognized data and cannot be used.
The backup file is unusable. You must erase it, or choose another file.
An inconsistency was encountered on the requested media.

Cause:
The main cause of the problem is that the BKF file has become corrupt due to any of the aforementioned reasons. One of the reasons can be that there are missing catalog files of the backed up data. The catalog files are stored at the following location in your system:

%SystemRoot%\Documents and Settings\Account\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\catalogs

What happens is that when you create more than one backup simultaneously, the catalog files share identical timestamp attribute. In this case, the backup set that was attributed first was displayed in the Restore tab and other backups were sometimes not displayed in the list. Because of this, the BKF file got corrupt and you had to perform BKF recovery to repair BKF file. This should be done using a third-party BKF repair application. Such read-only tools employ fast yet sophisticated algorithms to scan the damaged area.

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