Customer Reviews

EMC Insignia Retrospect Desktop - (V. 6.1) - Complete Package - 2 Clients - CD - Mac (925644) Category: Data Recovery Software

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Like other reviewers, I used to swear by Dantz backup software. I used its DiskFit for years. When I upgraded to OS X, I got Dantz's Retrospect and have had a fair number of problems.

1. Dantz gives you one free tech call in the first 30 days and then charges like $70 if you have a problem after that. I think they should give you one free tech call ANYTIME. Most users won't have a problem in the first 30 days -- and when you have a problem after your first hard-drive disaster, getting hit for $70 just adds insult to injury.

2. In order to use an external hard-drive as a backup location, you've got to select this option inside a couple of screens in preferences. This should be the default, especially since this is the favored way of backing up an entire internal hard drive. And even if you've selected it in preferences, if you crash and have to restore from the original CD, you've got to remember this minor selection or your restore won't work, causing much panic as I found out.

3. The program has behaved differently with different backups, causing confusion. For months it performed the backup simply to my external hard drive, then one day it required that my external hard drive be erased to do the backup.

4. When I did experience a problem that required a restore, the program crashed AFTER erasing my hard drive but BEFORE restoring anything. This was distressful.

5. I've had to use the manual many times in my backups because the program simply isn't intuitive.

I give it two stars because I was actually able to restore my data and the thing grudgingly does its job. But, man, I wish it worked more simply for the average user who doesn't give a darn about scripting and network backups.

I use to swear by retrospect and it never let me down until OS X. Since Dantz started to support OS X its been "You can purchase Retrospect Support, for $xxx a year...." and how good is this support? Not very I have a very common DVDR Drive that they still don't support, I wouldn't complain if I owned the express back up, but I own the Pro package and the support is lousy! so many $$$ a call to find out that I need to update to their new software after I had just purchased an upgrade and then they still can't say they know if they support a Pioneer A107 DVDR!? $150 plus a year for support I don't think so..

If you're not already a user, Retrospect for Mac is not a product you want to buy into. The interface hasn't been substantially updated in over a decade. In this decade Dantz (EMC) has charged it's users half a dozen times for "upgrades" which should be free updates as all that was added was the ability to actually work with the current operating system.

The interface is obtuse and backwards. For example, in a slap in the face to anyone with usability experience, Retrospect demands, in a modal dialog, that the user approves and affirms the desire to back up. Gee, let's see, I just got through booting Retrospect, selecting "Back Up" and about 45 other steps directly involved with only one purpose: backing up my hard drive... maybe now is the time to reconsider?!?

Retrospect is also exceedingly fickle and fragile. Exactly what you don't want in times of emergency. For example, I was backing up on a 4x SuperDrive, then I bought a new Mac and wanted to back up to a 16x SuperDrive. Retrospect would not allow it, complaining that the "device was too different." The slightest scratch on a DVD and Retrospect gets sick and dies--sometimes taking the DVD--and sometimes the entire DVD drive--with it. One time after Retrospect crashed, the drive wouldn't spin down: even after restart. I had to reset the OpenFirmware; a process not many Mac users do or should have to know about.

Retrospect is S L O W. I've got a Quad G5 backing up to aforementioned 16x DVD drive. The drive sits idle about 80% of the time. I get no speed improvement over the 750 MHx G4/ 4x SuperDrive. The bottleneck isn't the processor or the SATA chain or the DVD drive, the bottleneck is built into Retrospect.

Retrospect transforms your data from being readable anywhere into their undisclosed proprietary format. This means that when Dantz finally folds (any day now) you won't be able to retrieve your data.

The problem is, of course, alternatives are few and far between. Basic HD to HD backups can be done with Carbon Copy Cloner. But they're not incremental and cannot write to DVDs. iBackup has so little info on their site, I can't tell you what it does. Dobry Backuper looks promising. Intego Personal Backup X4 might merit looking into as well.

Over the past two months I've tried to get this software to create two sets of incremental backups of a Mac on two USB2 hard disks. Despite more than 20 years experience with computers, and a successful installation of Norton Ghost 9.0 backup software on a PC, I have not been able to get dantz Retrospect Backup 6.0 Desktop Macintosh to work on my system. I'm sure that a dantz(TM) engineer could sit down in front of the Mac, execute a dozen or so commands and get it to work properly, but that would not in any way prove that Retrospect Backup 6.0 is an acceptable product. The problem of this, and many other software packages, is that there are a huge number of combinations of optional settings that don't work, so if the errors are intermittant, it can take years to debug without proper guidance from the designers. The Retrospect Backup 6.0 backup manual is at least six times thicker than the manual that came with first MacIntosh computers. Its content usefulness is next to zero. The same can be said for the usefulness of the online help menus. The consumer expectation for a desktop backup solution is a single button guiding you through menus and getting the setup done and verified in five minutes. With so much easy-to-use and intuitive Mac and PC software available today, it is next to criminal for the dantz(TM) marketing materials to claim ease of use, especially software written for Mac, where the ease-of-use standard is very high. I recommend that people never buy any dantz(TM) software product. If the CEO feels otherwise, I'd like to hear his/her case and I may reconsider. When they call I will only charge two dollars per minute.

Dantz Retrospect 6.0 is an industrial grade product. From what I can tell it's nicely implemented when it comes to supporting backups in a "heavy" environment.

For my use on my G4 Mac (dual 825 Mhz processors w/1 GByte of ram) I find it pretty hard to use.

For example, to backup files from a single directory, you have to choose the "Source" but that only let's you choose a source disk or create a "Volume" that only seems to be able to contain a whole disk. There's no option to directly specify a directory as the backup "Source". There's no screen specific help button on the screens where these terms are mentioned.

To backup an individual directory, it looks like you have to specify a "Selecting" option separate from the "Source" option where the "Selecting" option let's you specify substring to match against filenames/directoris when looking at the "Source". Again there's no screen specific help button in the "Selecting" screen.

I'm trying to backup the files in a singe directory right now, but Retrospect seems to be scanning all files and folders on my Mac. I'm actually writing this review while waiting for Dantz to scan my whole hard drive.

This seems brain damaged. I suspect I'm doing something wrong. So I'll go read the manual and figure it out, but that's exactly the problem. You have to read the manual to use this product.

I'm also curious about why Retrospect has to scan each file on the whole hard disk *before* starting the backup. When finishing a whole disk backup it spends something like a half hour "closing files" (after files have already been backed up and verified on my 60 Gbyte disk with 15 Gbytes of space used).

Nobody would give the authors of this software an ease-of-use award. From the outset it behaves as if it were written to please IT specialists and others whose careers depend on things being complicated and incomprehensible to mortals. Even when Retrospect is being directed to do something simple, it is not simple to do because it speaks some alien jargon. It could really serve as a model for bad interface design.

It isn't much discussed, but the Mac is really lacking quality tools for backup, file synchronization, and similar critical tasks.

'Bought it, and sent it back for a refund. I should have believed all of the negative reviews that Retrospect received (on the Amazon site). I am a skilled personal computer user who has installed and successfully operated a large amount of both software and hardware. However, I was unsuccessful at getting Retrospect to perform properly. My rating of Retrospect is "Junk". Worse yet, I could not find a Help Line telephone number to talk with a real person - that might have made a big difference. They want you to use their website for ALL problem solving. Well think of this: if their instructions included in their big manual didn't work in the first place, why would you expect the website to work? They ought to be paying me for time lost and shipping charges.

As a independent consultant and longtime user of Retrospect for both Macintosh and PC I can say with authority it is a great product that allows me to provide professional level backup to my clients on either platform. While the learning curve is admittedly steep I paid my dues years ago and could not imagine changing to another product. My only complaint currently is the Mac version of the product has fallen behind the Windows version and is sadly in need of a major update. I suspect this is related to the rapid changes in OS-X and hope they are waiting for release of Leopard to revise the product. Of course the inclusion of the new "Time machine" in Leopard may also change the entire game and conceivably even be the end of Retrospect for Macintosh. If Apple provides an easy to use and reliable backup tool as part of the operating system then that could also explain why EMC has not invested in the R&D for a new version as it may become irrelevant. Only time will tell the outcome, the PC version of Retrospect has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years and the Mac version has barely kept up by comparison. Smart business decisions on the part of Retrospect as the PC market is huge and the vast majority of Macintosh users are unwilling to pay the price of professional level product or invest the time needed to master a product with this much power. It will be a shame if EMC decides to let the Mac product wither on the vine and focus entirely on the PC market.

Loved Retrospect when it first came out. I've used this version on 3 different computers. Some with freshly formatted source and destination drives. Never completes without errors that render the backup sets unusable. If you buy it make sure you suspect Retrospect first and not waste your valuable 30 days free support working on the drives as I did.

Retrospect is a terrible software application for the ordinary Mac or Windows user. Both versions are complex and difficult to use, and the interfaces are extremely unintuitive. To make matters worse, EMC will want to charge you $69 if you need help with this indecipherable mess. I only hope that the Time Machine backup feature that debuts with Mac's Leopard version of OS X will finally put this product out of business.