Tasks have all disappeared

[peterzejda]

Today when I opened the Cobian user interface, everything came up as "empty". That is, none of my tasks were there, and each of the Task properties, History, and Log tabs were empty (except for the welcome message in the Log "Welcome to Cobian Backup 11!").

I first went to look at my running services, and confirmed that both Cobian Backup 11 Gravity and Cobian Backup 11 Volume Shadow Copy Requester services are running. I also stopped and restarted them, just in case. I can also confirm that I only have one instance of the Cobian Backup 11 - User interface running.

I did a bit of poking around, and within the DB directory (located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Cobian Backup 11\DB) I did note that there are 8 .cbu files, which seems to correspond to the number of tasks I previously had. Based on timestamps of the .cbu files, it appears the last backup run occurred on 2021-12-12. There are also two .lst file ("MainList (2).lst" and "MainList.lst"), but both of these files are basically empty (according to their properties, each is only two bytes in size). Note that the last time I made any changes to the tasks was likely more than 1/2 a year ago.

I then tried looking at a full hard disk backup taken on 2021-11-11 (using Cobian backup...ironic, no? :-p) and it also shows the same files in the DB directory, except without the "MainList (2).lst" file. The "MainList.lst" file is still empty, and is also empty in an older back up taken on 2021-03-15.

Lastly, I tried upgrading to Cobian Reflector, hoping that during the installation it might load the tasks from Cobian Backup, but unfortunately, that also did not work. Cobian Reflector runs / works as expected, but the task list is empty.

Can you give me a suggestion on how to recover my tasks? I could do so on my current installation, or else pull files from a full drive backup (as noted above). Of course I realize I could re-create them from scratch, but since I spend several hours getting them set up just right, and my memory of exactly how I did that is a bit foggy, I'd really rather recover them if possible.

Thanks in advance,
Peter

[cobian]

You need to import the old list into reflector. Gravity has not been updated since 2011 and won't be updated anymore.

[peterzejda]

Thanks, and I am happy to move to Cobian Relfector, and have it install on my system. However, as the Cobian Backup list was empty, this also applies to Cobian Reflector after import. I have tried importing both the "MainList (2).lst" file and the "MainList.lst" file from Cobian Backup, but the resulting task list is still empty (just as it was for Cobian Backup). I'm not sure when or why the list became empty, but is there a way I can recreate it from the .cbu files?

[cobian]

The cbu files are history files.

[peterzejda]

Ah well, no worries. At least I can gather some basic data from the .cbu files about what tasks were being run. Meanwhile, it seems like somehow the MainList.lst file got overwritten or perhaps corrupted at some point. I noticed that this file is rewritten during backup operations, so it might not hurt to create a backup of this file each time before updating / overwriting it.

In any case, I found an even older backup (actually of a laptop I owned previous to this laptop) and was able to recover a MainList.lst file from there, and it had most of my backup tasks. So, I used that and then made adjustments from there.

Thanks for your help. I'm all set for now.

[cobian]

In this old version the file was accessed by the engine AND the interface. Never seen that this could cause any problems but perhaps...

In the new version, only the engine access and writes to the file.