[G4] Dantz Retrospect

[Alex]

On Wednesday, Jan 21, 2004, at 08:39 Canada/Eastern, Joseph B. Gurman 
wrote:

>> 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.

It was meant exactly as it sounds; whether it sounds to you the way it 
sounds to me, that's a different issue.

> 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.

Any documentation for an unfamiliar complex tool will be at first 
difficult. The comparison to driving a car is -- of course, IMHO -- 
apt. Forget that you're an American, and therefore you were familiar 
with cars even before you could walk. For a great many people in ROW 
(the rest of the world), cars are not at all familiar, and for someone 
from rural China (or, like me, from a less-than-privileged background 
in Eastern Europe) something as simple as driving to the supermarket 
might be a daunting task.

> (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.

Not necessarily. It seems to me you assume something is either 
'cryptic' or 'intuitive'. But that is not so. For instance, compare 
Chaucer's lines

"Whan that Aprille with hise shoures sote/The droghte of March hath 
perced to the rote [...]"

to e.e. cummings'

"spring is like a perhaps hand/(which comes carefully/out of 
Nowhere)arranging/a window [...]"

I find Chaucer difficult but not cryptic. I don't need a dictionary for 
cummings -- but I find him cryptic, to say the least. Retrospect's 
manual is well written; it's difficult -- if one is not familiar with 
its concepts -- but not cryptic. Settle down with it as you would 
settle with any manual or textbook and you're in business pretty soon.

>  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.

[...]

> 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.

This -- and several other posts about SilverKeeper or CCC -- seem to me 
to be a different issue. Not, "How to use Retrospect", but "Is 
Retrospect the best backup tool for me?" or "What's a good back up tool 
for the Mac?", to which, of course, there will be different answers.

f