[G4] Dantz Retrospect

[Joseph B. Gurman]

     Lots of comments here....

Alex wrote:
>  > I'm reading the manual for this backup software and finding it cryptic.
>
>I don't see anything particularly cryptic about it.
>
>>  All I want to do is make monthly backups of my whole hard drive [...]
>
>All I want to do is drive to the supermarket and get the groceries.
>Can't do it without learning to drive...

     It may not have been meant that way, but this just comes off 
sounding more than a bit snottty. I had performed backups for years 
on Digital OpenVMS systems before I started using Retrospect ten 
years or so ago, and the documentation was as impenetrable to me then 
as it is lucid now --- it all depends on your experience. (In my 
case, familiar terms were used in an unfamiliar, and even 
counterintuitive way....since, as Sir Peter Medawar once put it, "All 
intuition is based on experience.") If you have none, the 
documentation may be so much gibberish.

Alex also wrote:

>If SilverKeeper works for you, great -- it's free. (It's available for
>download at <http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/>.) But Retrospect is in
>a different class altogether.

     Agreed; absolutely.

Daniel Brieck wrote:

>Maybe something else is a better choice than Dantz retrospect? It
>starts like this you buy the Retrospect software which works well, then
>you update mac os x and retrospect is now slightly broken. Now it is
>time  to spend $59.00 ( for Example I bought  5.1 update in July 2003)
>for an upgrade to get back to full functionality. This seems to repeat
>itself every 6 months Now since i have panther 10.3 I have to yet again
>upgrade to the so call 6.0 version to get panther... This is plain
>ridiculous and I don't think I am going to waste my money on the Dantz
>software. I don't know if this all Dantz's fault but Apple certainly
>plays a role in the software problems. I think $60 every six months is
>wrong..... Does anyone else agree?

     I think this is what is known as an economic decision: if you can 
get something free or cheaper that gets the job done as well as you 
need it done, agreed. If not, and your data/operating environment is 
worth more than $60 every six months to preserve, no. A user's 
experience and comfort level with shell commands and cron jobs comes 
into the decision, as well.

     A lot of the changes Dantz has made in going from 5.1 -> 6.0 are 
Panther-related, many are the result of user feedback, and many are 
the result of users' complaints that the Mac version couldn't do what 
the Windows one could, and where was Dantz's loyalty to the folks who 
sustained them for so many years, anyway? Such changes cost money: 
you pay programmers, you run beta test programs, you advertise the 
new features, you even (once a year?) print new packaging and 
documentation.

     Is it worth it to me? On systems we use as backup servers for 
several machines, yes (even though I gag at the prices for Workgroup 
Backup and [aargh] Server Backup) --- the work preserved is worth 
much more, to us. On standalone servers to which we can attach 
external FireWire drives or arrays, no, because we can use the shell 
command 'ditto' to create a bootable image of the boot drive every 
night, and we're less concerned with the ancient history of the drive 
than its current state. Likewise, on servers serving data archives 
whose contents (on a percentage basis) change slowly, ditto is more 
appropriate than Retrospect, and a lot faster. (FWIW, Carbon Copy 
Cloner is a GUI front end for ditto, but really for 10.2 and earlier 
--- it used not to be possible to clone the entire disk in a single 
command line, particularly if you added new, top-level directories, 
but it is in 10.3). For laptops, we like products such as CMS's ABS 
Plus, which perform an incremental backup as soon as you attach the 
FireWire cable. YM, of course, MV.

     For a home/small office user unused to unix shell commands, 
though, Retrospect Express is a very nice solution.... once the user 
understands the terms in the documentation as Dantz uses them. The 
original poster's desirement was exactly the kind of thing at which 
Retrospect excels: I want to back up the whole shebang once a month, 
and my working files every night --- especially when you consider 
Retrospect's capability for allowing the user to go back to a 
snapshot on any date on which a backup was performed.

     Sorry for the length of the rant.

						Joe Gurman

-- 
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by."
                                                             - Douglas 
Adams, 1952 - 2001

Joseph B. Gurman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar Physics
Branch, Greenbelt MD 20771 USA