Customer Reviews

Retrospect 8.0 Desktop 3U Mac Mac 8.0 [Old Version]

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(4)

 

 

As of December 3, 2009, this product is STILL not ready for primetime yet.

The old Retrospect 6 (and earlier) were fantastic products, but EMC decided to reinvent the wheel with Retrospect 8, and what they ended up with is:

1. A HORRIBLY UNINTUITIVE INTERFACE. They tried to squeeze an entire enterprise-level backup system into ONE WINDOW!! What sort of an interface guru came up with that brilliant idea? One window for 250+ different functions?? What Retrospect has become a TORTURED user interface that makes absolutely no sense at all, even if you have been a 15-year veteran of Retrospect like I am.

2. A tremendously BUGGY program that is not ready for prime time. It crashes, it gives strange error messages, buttons don't work as expected, features are incomplete (you can only backup computers in alphabetical order!). Network issues abound -- computers that were backing up just fine with Retrospect 6 no longer backup fine with Retrospect 8 (and yes, all updates have been applied on all computers).

Retrospect 8 has been a complete disaster for us and a pain in our arse on a daily basis. Avoid this product and stick with Retrospect 6.

I purchased Retrospect 8.1 for my MacBOok Pro. 8.1 is a newer version than the listed 8.0 I have been a long time user of Retrospect 6, the earlier version of this backup software. The new version 8.1 is not ready for public use. With my many years of software evaluation, testing and design, I find this new product from EMC to be the least ready for public use. Too many bugs. You will be spending your time attempting to due what QA people should have done prior to the release of this product.
Be aware! I only want to warn people. I hope that this product will be made ready for public use. At that time I will even spend more money for the upgrade, if necessary, although I will carry a bitter taste from my experience with version 8.1.

Backup is an unsolved problem. Time Machine has a relatively good reputation, but I've run into problems with it. I'm not willing to trust my data to Time Machine alone.

Retrospect Professional (Windows) had even more problems 3 years ago, but it's worked well enough for me over the past few years. Yes, it's complex and hard to understand, but I've worked past that. Problem is, I don't want to keep my XP box running just to run Retrospect Pro.

So I've been testing Retrospect 8. It's just as complex as Retrospect Pro/Win, but I know how to configure it. So complexity isn't a problem. It's fast too. I haven't really challenged it, but the backup portion has seemed to work well enough. The real test, however, is a restore.

So why haven't I tested the restore?

Because Retrospect 8 has a big, red, flag.

There's no manual. The support forums promised a manual in June, but it's MIA. For this kind of software, a manual is not an option (PDF of course).

The only explanation for investing in this software, and then failing to deliver a manual, is catastrophic mismanagement. It tells us that the software is probably unfinished, that the team ran out of money before the product was done.

If you have any other option, I recommend avoiding Retrospect 8 until EMC can produce a manual.

This is a complex, powerful product. You may have an easy to backup system, if so, this might be overkill for you. We have multiple Mac's (Intel) a complex network structure and an aging but powerful Infrant ReadyNAs NAS. The NAS is a RAID 5 NAS, with a priceless collection of photos and documents. I back up from the NAS to an external drive (RAID 1) for safety's sake. Retrospect has the power and performance to do this without a hitch and it performs well while doing it. I regularly achieve about 15MB/s backing up across a Gigabit network to a FW800 External Drive. You can download a 30 day trial of this application and try it out. Personally, I like it but it is a less expensive copy of a professional tool so it is not an easy to understand tool

I agree that this application should have supported Power PC and offered compatibility with previous versions. But with that said, for users with Intel Macs looking for a fast, stable, easy-to-use and powerful backup solution, Retrospect 8 is quite good. I was skeptical till I downloaded a 30-day trial. After using it for the past 3 weeks I'm quite pleased. The backups are faster than version 6 without the annoying hang that used to precede verification. And the initial scan and compare function is faster as well. In short, I've decided to splurge for the upgrade. Hopefully they'll release a backwards compatible version soon, but I now do backups to HDs whereas my old version 6 backups were on DAT tape that I don't use any more so I think the transition (for me) will be smooth.

And I quote from the Read Me "Retrospect 8.1 cannot import configurations or read Backup Sets from versions 6.x or earlier. Clients will need to be added, and scripts will need to be scheduled anew with version 8.1."

This is so disappointing! An industrial strength backup solution NEEDS to be backwards compatible. Now I need to keep two versions of Retrospect on my machine. And as we finish migrating to Intel Macs I'll have to keep a PowerPC around just in case I need to recover something from the 6.x archives. Ridiculous!

And again I quote from the Read Me "Retrospect 8.1 performs slowly on PowerPC-based Macs. For the best performance, EMC strongly recommends that users upgrade their Retrospect servers to Intel-based Macs. For those who cannot upgrade at this time, EMC software engineers are continuing to improve Retrospect 8's performance on all processor types, and performance boosts are likely in a future release."

This is a little worrisome to me, how slow is slowly? More slowly than it runs on a Intel Mac, or more slowly than 6.x ran on a PowerPC Mac? I can't have Retrospect tying up my computer for extended periods of time. Not only that but EMC had been promising Mac users a new version of Retrospect (8.0) was coming for three years before it finally happened. How long is it going to be before they release an upgraded version with the promised "performance boosts". I'm not going to be holding my breath.

I have been a Retrospect Mac user for MANY years and was entirely satisfied thru all the prior versions under EMC. This has been a fantastic product.... until now. With the changeover to the new Retrospect 8 (I'm currently on V8.2 (399) with Server and 3 clients) and all the problems associated with that transition, and now Roxio's acquisition of the product, I must now regretfully say that Retrospect SUCKS and I'll be looking for a replacement immediately. I have encountered MANY buggy problems, but the final straw was the 2 hours I spent this morning trying to save (3) basic backup scripts, which mysteriously and gratuitously set and reset themselves to back up the wrong computers to the wrong data sets, or which erased the script entirely no matter what was done to try and save it. I simply cannot have confidence in a critical data backup program that can't even save its own backup scripts. I tried to contact Roxio for tech support, but found that the Retrospect product isn't even shown in their list of supported backup products. I'm done..... Best of luck if you decide to go with Retrospect, you'll need it!