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From:dantz , Dantz ,
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See Product Page
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#4774 |
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3 of 3 customers found the following review helpful:
 Even more difficult than before, 2006-08-22
I've been using Retrospect for 10 years. It's always been deep software and hard to get it working correctly, but I always have succeeded until now. If you buy this, you can expect to have difficulty setting up your devices. I have a Mac G5 with a Superdrive running Tiger. But I can't seem to get it to work with DVD-R or DVD-RW media. Keeps crashing the software.
Dantz was bought out by EMC and the support on the EMC website is sparse for Retrospect.
8 of 8 customers found the following review helpful:
 Still the Standard for Mac Backups, 2006-04-16
Retrospect is an extremely powerful backup solution, and for many years was the standard, and perhaps the only real backup software solution for Macintosh. However, since the debut of Mac OS X, many other solutions have flourished. Retrospect to many now seems a dinosaur--confusing, quirky, not often updated, with only acceptable technical support. However, in my opinion, it's still the standard, what other programs compare themselves to.
Retrospect is not really designed for a single computer backup--while I use it for that task (I backup my home folder daily, and my whole computer weekly), Retrospect shines at backuping a whole network full of Mac and Windows PCs, and thus may seem a little confusing for the single-computer user. However, I was able to pretty easily create a rock-solid backup system (daily home folder backups, weekly hard drive backups) that stores all my files on my external hard drive. I've only restored once, but when I did (an obscure preference file); Retrospect searched through its backup and found five copies of that script (I use the recommended "incremental backups for four/8 weeks, then reload and restart the set" method)--recovery worked perfectly, if a little slowly.
This "Upgrade" package is for those who have Retrospect Desktop or Express, version 4.3 or above. Retrospect Express is a slimmed-down version of this software that came with many hard drives and utilities, like (in my case) Norton Systemworks. I recommend, if you're planning on buying Retrospect, to try to find a copy of Express you can use to upgrade--it saves you quite a bit of money.
This "Desktop" edition comes with two free client licenses, so if you have a home network with three computers on it, you can backup all three computers, making one the server and two the clients.
I bought this copy since it cost the same as an activation key on Retrospect's site and wanted something physical, a manual, a CD, something. When you buy this; all you get is a CD sleeve with a key and a Retrospect install CD. However, the copy of Retrospect on the CD and in fact the whole CD can be downloaded from EMC's site; so all you're getting from this is a professionally-burned restore/install CD.
If after reading this you're still not sure if you want to buy Retrospect, I suggest reading the "Take Control of Mac OS X Backups" ebook by Joe Kissell.
15 of 19 customers found the following review helpful:
 Hit or Miss Recovery Software, 2004-09-13
I upgraded to Retrospect 6.0 for Mac in hopes that it would be more reliable than the previous version, Retropsect Express 5.0. An attractive feature in 6.0 is that one can use the software to create a specialized driver for one's particular CD/DVD burner. I had hoped that this feature would allow for more reliable backups. Unfortunately, the software is still too sensitive. Sometimes it would write cleanly to my DVD/CD media. Then at other times, the program wouldn't finish -- on the log, the program would say that the write heads were dirty (even for brand new media). I had a situation where the program created a backup to 10 spanned CD-RW's (took most of the day to create), but upon verification, rejected my image copy. If one sucessfully creates an image copy, then that copy is useable to restore from -- I have a set created in April 2004 which I use as my emergency backup. However, there is no guarantee that one can easily create another image copy whenever one needs one, because sometimes the software works and other times, it would say the write heads are dirty. The program does seem to work better with CD-R or DVD-R media and not RW media.
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