Customer Reviews

Restropect BACKUP 6.0 professional for Windows

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Retrospect appears to function, but was virtually useless to me because it's interface uses techno-speak jargon that, even after wasted hours with the manual, was not intelligible. I am a very computer literate end user, having run my own office computers since before Windows (does anyone remember DOS?). I've used various backup software. The manual was no help, because it just keeps using the same terms as the program (like "volume" and "sub-volumes"). The programmers assume you are already inside their heads and know their terminology.

I got it to back up my drive. Then, when I had a problem, I tried to use the "restore" function. This function deleted files and destroyed Windows XP. The drive was not even bootable after Retrospect got through with it's "restore" function. Maybe I did something wrong, but how could I know because the program is speaking Greek (or more accurately, Geek-speak) and I speak English. 15 hours of complete OS and all program re-install. On the bright side, at least retrospect still had the data on the other drive to which I had backed up. I made lucky guesses about how to retrieve that data from the proprietary format that retrospect backs up to. (Again, the manual and interface were grossly unclear to me.) The final insult to injury was that when I called Dantz support to ask for a technician to translate the program's language into English for me, I was told I'd have to pay [money] per incident because my problem occurred more than 30 days after purchase.

Bottom line: Takes much too much time to translate the program's jargon into usable information - assuming that is eventually possible. Meanwhile, you're at risk of making mistakes that can destroy your system - assuming the problems I had were not due to the program itself malfundtioning. I consider this an example of the very worst failure of programmers to create a usable product because they cannot make the program speak in the language of the end user. ...

I need to backup my iBook to a PC. There are very few good alternatives for this. Basically, Retrospect Professional 6.0 is the only game in town. (Retrospect Express depends on Apple's fragile SMB support, though the latter is improving).

[NOTE: the server software installs on Win32 machine, the client software on a Mac (classic or OSX) or Win32 machine. The server software will backup up the server two, so you can backup up at least 3 machines for one license.]

It works, more or less, but:

1. It wouldn't backup to my ancient tape drive, though it was supposed to support it. It stopped at 14-15MB and drove CPU utilization to 100%. Other backup software works with this drive. The tape drive was too small for my uses anyway, I now backup to a removeable IDE drive.

2. If you register very soon after purchase, you get a week or two of tech support. After than tech support costs hundreds of dollars per incident. Web support is so-so. The forums work well, but many questions go unanswered.

3. To backup "in use" files you have to buy an additional plug-in.

4. This software installs very low level software into the clients. (That's how it gets around permissions, access, etc). A single password provides a Retrospect 6 user access to everything on the clients. I hate installing low level software hacks into my systems, esp. when the software is coming from a company with an unclear commitment to quality. In practice however it seems to be working well.

5. Backup IS very fast over a 100 MB/sec LAN to a hard drive.