Customer Reviews

Retrospect 6.5 Professional

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

 

 

For over a decade, I've looked for the perfect backup utility, and I thought that I'd finally found it. It had to be automatic without needing a third-party add-on (unlike built-in Windows backup utilities), it had to incremental but smart enough to know what I'd changed (whereas others seem to take guesses, not always accurately), it had to allow for multiple backup routines (e.g. daily to another hardrive and weekly to a Zip drive), and it had to be user friendly (or my wife wouldn't use it, too).

Ta-da - this does all that. .... BUT, if you want to backup opened files, be prepared to spend hundreds of dollars extra, ouch! For example, I need a daily backup of my Outlook *.PST file(email, contacts, todos, appointments, etc.) but I routinely leave Outlook open rather than closing it every night. When I realized that this entailed an extra cost, I lowered my rating of this product from 5 to 3 stars.

So, I guess I'm still looking...

With all the backup programs out there, and all the PC configurations, it can be difficult to find two that go together. Dantz's Retrospect Professional is the way to go. Others, such as PowerQuest's Drive Image and Norton's Ghost, support only certain CD and DVD drives. And even if your drive is on their list, there is no guarantee the product will work. Retrospect does the others one better. If you drive isn't on their list, Retrospect has a feature that will create a driver for you. Another great feature of Retrospect is the fact that once you back up your entire computer, you never have to do the whole thing again. Whenever you want to back up again, Retrospect only copies items that have changed.

My original review is below. I've since revised my estimate downwards. I've used both 6.0 and 6.5 for about a year and a half. I can't recommend this product. It feels like it's lost its way; as though it changed product management one time too often. Error messages are cryptic and often uninterpretable. The only way you can really know a backup has completed is to try a restore. It has more failure modes than any other piece of software I've worked with. Retrospect has always been complex, but the various pieces seem to work together less well over time. Dantz charges a great deal for tech support, I think that has caused them to lose touch with their customer base.

It's still true that for some LAN configurations there's no real alternative to Retrospect. In that case do buy it, but expect to constantly review logs and do not expect to have confidence in the software.

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I've used Retrospect 6.0 for about a year. I'm only now upgrading ($43) to Retrospect 6.5. Seeing how few posts there are here, however, I want to chip in and help out a bit. Some key points:

1. If you need to backup a mixed LAN (Windows and Mac) there's no competition to Retrospect. This is the only option in the marketplace. I backup my iBook and two PCs (one client and one is the server) using Retrospect. I back up to removeable hard drives -- there's really no other viable solution for the SOHO and home market.

2. This is one HECK of a complex piece of software. Don't even consider it if you're not a guru.

3. It's ornery and persnickety. Once one graduates with a black belt in backup it's very fast and very powerful. Device support is problematic.

4. Just to be clear -- this runs on a Windows machine. The host machine doesn't have to be a server, I've used Win2K and WinXP hosts.

5. Because of the client/server architecture it uses I can back up 10GB of data from by iBook overnight across a slow wireless LAN.

6. This is an industrial strength product. It will scale to a huge enterprise.

7. I think Dantz support is improving. About 2 years ago I think they were at the edge of bankruptcy. Since Apple's fortunes have stabilized, and they've had time to get OS X support working better, I think they're turning around. Their customer forums are very good.

Bottom line. Home and small business backup is really broken -- but not only at Dantz. There are real market and technology problems that are making backup very hard to do -- data demands have grown too fast for the industry. Ultimately Google or Microsoft will own network backup, but customers aren't yet ready to pay. In the meantime Dantz is the right choice for a certain customer who has:

1. A mixed LAN. Sorry, you need this.
2. A need for professional backup and the capacity to manage it.

For many customers, unfortunately, there is no currently available backup solution.

Bought the package in the first place for use with my Onstream ADR tapestreamer. Retrospect works flawlessy with this hardware. The inferface looks Spartan and could be a bit more intuitive but is still better then most competitors. Still I give the package 5 stars, because it works fast and reliable. Gives me the feeling of putting my data in a safe vault. Does everything one expects of a backup app, much options and once installed and configured to my needs, it works fully automatic. I let it make a daily backup on my second harddrive and every week on tape. What I like especially is that Retrospect, after the initial backup, saves only modified files with a minimum of space on the media used. Looks like the usual incremental backup? It's better then that. Last week my wife worked on an old document and saved it erroneously under the old name, while she needed also the old version. After a couple of days we used Retrospect to go back to the state of January 6th, to retrieve the file in its former state. And if I delete a file on March 23, I don't see it in the backup of March 24, but I can go back to the backup of March 23 and there it is.

This program is powerful and versatile, but it's difficult to use, especially if you use different media (hard disk, zip disks, DVDs, etc.). They also call things that we were already familiar with, like disk sets and incremental backups, differently. The printed manual is nice, though.

To the guy from Pa. who couldn't use the DVD writer: next time get a better namebrand. Retrospect works great with the built-in Toshiba DVD burner in my laptop.

To create a recovery disk, Retrospect creates a CD image file which must be burned to a CD using another program (the file contains the restore software and a snapshot of the backed up hard drive). When backing up a single large drive, this file easily exceeds the size of a single CD, preventing the use of XP's built in CD burner. The manual said absolutely nothing about this (weak and confusing documentation). Instead, I found the information hidden away in a text file on the Retrospect CD. Because the box and manual said nothing about having to purchase additional software (considering the price of Retrospect, one certainly wouldn't think so), I'm giving this program a low rating. Beyond this, Retrospect appears to be a great program.

After about 6 months of looking at weekly error logs and going around and around with IT, I have finally decided to do some of my own research to find out why this software continually fails.

I searched EMC/Dantz's "knowledge base" and the user guide and found no helpful information. A Google search for "Dantz Retrospect problems" lead me here.

Like so many previous reviewers have hinted at: this program is a major pain in the ***.

In the past 6 months it has been on my machine I have seen multiple errors both for the individual client PCs and for the server (we back them up separately on different days).

Both my IT firm and I are exploring a lot of different scenarios to sort out why these errors keep happening and so far, all of our fixes don't stay fixed.

For instance, we set up all of the individual clients, ran a test and everything looked fine. Come time for the scheduled back up however, and there are permissions issues on some of the PCs. So we trouble shoot the firewall, test ok again and the scheduled back up fails on the same and usually different machines or for some other issues (the list is growing).

Another ongoing mess is with the grooming of the actual hard drives Retrospect is supposed to back up to. It seems to fail to overwrite (despite multiple attempts to program it to do so) and instead appends - which means the drive fills up and the back up fails due to lack of memory. Example: My IT tech just groomed the hard drive yesterday afternoon yet last night's back up died as soon as it launched due to zero memory on the drive. Finding error messages first thing in the morning does not start my day well.

So around and around we go. This is a very small network. This should be a straight forward process but I have yet to have a single week where there is a flawless back up.

I have an older version of this. When my wife's computer crashed last week, it took the catalog with it. So now I have a recent back up of her hard drive (or disk as Retrospect calls it) which no version of Dant software seems to recognize so as to rebuild the catalog. I have several versions because I originally bought it, and then it came bundled with each of the three Maxtor one touch drives I have purchased.

I purchased this product based on a reccommendation from the David Lawrence Radio Show without checking its specific hardware support. As it turned out, no drivers for my newer Samsung CD-RW/DVD combo device are available from Dantz, and the program's "Custom Configuration" device was unable to configure/manufacture one that would work.

Now I am stuck with having to return the software (if Amazon allows) or 'invest' in a new compatible back up hardware device.

Be VERY cautious when buying this product -- wish I had been moreso.........

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...