Retrospect 6.5 Professional

Other products by dantz

Product Features

• Protection includes desktop & notebook backups, SimpleCrypt & strong DES encryption, and anti-virus software collaboration
• Includes compression
• 100% accurate and point-in-time restores to any point in time
• EasyScript Wizard for simple backup needs
• Comprehensive reporting, duplicates, archives, media verification, and backup verification

Product Details

Product Manual [5.22mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00009M7S5
• Item model number: PU10A006500
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 2, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #9,086 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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  Software > Utilities > Backup

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Overview: Retrospect Professional delivers proven business-class data protection capabilities in an easy-to-use software product for homes and small offices. Designed for safety and security, Retrospect Professional protects desktops and notebooks against loss due to viruses, newly installed software, user error, damaged hardware, hardware upgrades, hackers, and lost or stolen computers. Retrospect provides complete protection, ease of use, and fast backups with 100% accurate restores.

Key Benefits:

Proven technology: Fast, automated backups and ease of use make Retrospect Professional the software trusted to protect critical data on millions of computers worldwide. More than a decade of real-world experience, patented technology, and numerous awards combine to make Retrospect Professional the premier choice for home users, as well as small and midsize businesses.

Complete Protection: Retrospect Professional provides complete protection for desktops and notebooks. Retrospect backs up important data, all operating system files and settings, and device drivers, as well as applications and their settings for the local computer and for networked computers running the Retrospect Professional Client. Retrospect Professional supports a large variety of backup devices such as hard disks, CD/DVD drives, or tape drives. Whether you need to recover a file or folder, or perform a bare metal system restore, Retrospect Professionalt has you covered.

Fast Backups with 100% Accurate Restores: Retrospect Professional's patented Progressive Backup saves time because it backs up only new and changed files after the first full backup. Retrospect Professional performs 100% accurate restores without bringing back unwanted files and folders that were previously deleted, renamed, or moved. Other backup software avoids flawed restores only by repeatedly performing full backups, which wastes time and consumes backup media space.

Easy to Use: Install Retrospect Professional and perform your first backup in less than 10 minutes. The EasyScript Wizard guides you through the steps required to set up the automatic, scheduled backups of your networked computers. When backups are run, Retrospect Professional prompts for additional backup media if required. And when you need to perform a restore, Retrospect Professional locates files quickly--even if you're not sure on which piece of backup media they reside.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Still haven't found what I'm looking for, January 31, 2004

By	Ellis Godard (Moorpark, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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...

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Backup Program, September 5, 2003

By A Customer

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.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strictly for expert use -- but owns a niche space, October 8, 2004

By	John Faughnan "John G Faughnan (www.faughnan.... (St. Paul, MN USA) - See all my reviews

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.