STEVE HOWE  Too little too late.

Having come from a Retrospect background in the past, I always try to be agnostic in the backup tools I use, well you have to be. No single product can do every job, so, a wide knowledge of tools to do the many different jobs that various clients may require is fairly essential.

From offsite duplication, archival, synchronization, de-duplication, DLM/ILM systems, Disk to Disk to Disk or Disk to Disk to Tape, Virtual Tape Libraries and devices, SAN's and NAS systems, backup and recovery, backup plans, redundancy or resilience even Legal and Data Compliant systems including Sarbanes and international data transmission compliancy. The requirement list is endless but I have yet to find one product that can do everything for everyone and do it ALL exceptionally well.

For me Retrospect originally sat in the home to SMB market, for those people that might have a tape drive or library, it never really got any further.

BUT that doesn't mean it can't do it! up until now I have seen it backing up clients, servers, RAIDs in all sorts of manners and do it well, the Mac community took this product far beyond its original vision but it handled the punishment well, the problem is other products came along and offered more or the same and were much more simple to backup, why send an engineer out for half a day 'tweeking' retrospect to do AB & Z when you can deploy a solution in fraction of the time with a product designed to meet the modern needs of a backup solution.

So Retrospect came, and never really went, it lingered, in my opinion it was that guest at the party that didn't know when to leave, the guy that talks about a load of crap and consumes the free food and drink but doesn't really have anything to offer in return.

Retrospect became dormant, many mac support companies were stuck with it, but didn't know of any other option, they had either invested so much time in getting to know the product that anything else was too much of an investment or risk, or they didn't believe any other product was available for the Mac that really delivered on what it offered.

The updates slowed, and devices stopped working.

More and more alternatives came along, PresStore, Atempo, NetVault (Bakbone) and many other contenders, none of which seemed to take advantage of the situation, yet many offer competitive cross grades! I bet you may not have known that.

They all offer different solutions and alternative features, but most can easily replace Retrospect if you let them, yes you have to let them into your company first before they can help.

So along comes Retrospect 8 and what do we have?

To be honest an application which has some nice ideas but fails in so many ways, that it didn't come as a surprise.

It's fundamentally an unstable product that manages to over complicate things.

Remember backup should be simple, know your Data, know its Information and back it up!

It can be enough to write a backup strategy for a client

If your looking at a Retrospect 8 box right now or you have installed it, then good luck, I am sure EMC will eventually release enough patches to make it at least stable enough for prolonged use. But at the moment having seen it consistently crash on both clean (new) and existing machines. No warning, no reporting option and even on occasions no log entries on the system to tell you it crashed!

I have seen it crash and wipe out its plans, forget it's sources and even completely screw existing plans up. Crashing during backup and corrupting a catalogue, even not crashing and deciding to recycle a backup when I didn't ask it too!

If it was stable then we get onto the over complicated areas of the product, you specify both destinations and sources in the sources section! why I have no idea, file paths are not clear so if you have 2 folders with similar or the same names (backup/backups/backup etc) you will need to double check them as Retrospect has enough quirks to make you question your own sanity.

Then we have the excellent way that you start creating a script but then you close it to define it further, with the very dangerous fact that you can modify scripts in a list without actually opening them!!

If you were one of the early ones to move away from Retrospect being your only product of choice then you will be pleased to hear that you, like me made a wise decision.

If you were contemplating it, but never did or where clinging onto the slim hope that EMC may actually take their product and market serious enough to warrant releasing a product worthwhile, then carry on with your hope or look at alternatives because you will be waiting for quite some time.  
(Version 8.1.150)

ITTY  They seem to be going out of their way to get rid of small-size users. I've been a customer since the '80's when the original product was called DiskFit.

But now the single-user has to jump through hoops to make what should be a simple installation. Then there's the overly complex interface.

Chalk me up to another customer lost to ChronoSync.  
(Version 8.1.148)

DELUGACH  I have used Retrospect in various forms and versions since November 1998. I abandoned it about a year ago and have never looked back. I always suspected that it may be suited for sysadmins in very large enterprises, but more and more it seemed a clunky and confusing solution to the (important) general backup problem. Its only really valuable feature was compressed backups to save space.

I use Time Machine and Super Duper and don't really seem to need anything else. Yes, compressed backups would be nice, but not worth the hassle of figuring out how Retrospect works. An unpredictable or confusing backup is worse than none at all. I'm sure the Retrospect folks have a perfectly clear concept in their minds but it was never clear to me. Sorry.  
(Version 8.1.148)

JIM WEISBIN  As of version 8.0736, still does not work at all on my Mac Pro running OS X 10.5.6 (Leopard) server. I used the "wizard" to start an immediate backup either to File or to Disk. It appears as though something's "happening" (a yellowish "blob" "swings" into the "activities" bar from somewhere unknown - very Microsoftish), but no script actually runs. Also, the date of the "scheduled" backup for that run is 1969 - huh? Tried to schedule it on the server itself, as well as from another computer running OS X 10.5.6 Leopard (not server), same thing, nothing happens.

I was able to get something to happen on my machine which is not running server software, but after it starts the script it immediately crashes. In addition, the interface is dreadful. For example, say you are setting up a File type backup and are prompted as to where to store the catalogue. You want to make a new folder? Go ahead, but you have to make it, then close out of that dialogue and go back to actually use that folder. The disclosure triangles to the left of folders are sometimes invisible, and the interface does not look anything like Mac OS X. For example, if you want to get to your desktop folder, you have to navigate to /Users//Desktop. Ugh!

I called tech support and was told that I get one "free" service call. They gave me a ticket number and then put me on hold for 45 minutes. I gave up after that.

Probably the worst "release" version I have ever seen, ever ever evr.  
(Version 8.0.736)

JAN13  As I do agree 100% with STEVE HOWE, I did try this new version and it works just fine on my SONY Tape Drive ( SCSI on Mac G5 ).... I think, that I am going to be brave and spend some $$$ for BluRay DVD drive from LaCie as source for backups.

50 Gig will be much more then my SONY Tape drive and I am crossing fingers that it is going to work ...

I will post my result as soon as I find out ...   
(Version 8.1.526)

STUGOTS  I've used Retrospect for years, and tried most of the 8.0 Betas. Retrospect 8.0 is *not* yet ready for production use. It was rushed to market. Check their support forums (there are two, one for general questions and one for bugs), you'll see it has a lot of problems. Network performance is extremely slow, optical devices don't work, scripts get randomly mangled, and it crashes a lot for some users.

When they've debugged it, this may be a great product. They've dreamed up some nice new features, and the new UI may one day be great. But for now, stay away.  
(Version 8.0.608)

FILCHESCAT  It looks like this is still 8.0608.1, which has been available to the public since 4-8-09. As mentioned by others, user interface is different (change is good?) than the old reliable version 6 iterations, but the product itself is still beta quality. I've had problems with it silently quitting, not recognizing configured backup locations, especially on network storage devices. EMC tech support is fairly responsive, but looks to be overwhelmed by similar complaints. They like comments sent to their forum where they are kicked around by other uses, as if a group session will help solve problems - like a beta test group. Keep trying, EMC, is all I can say.  
(Version 8.0.608)

EAN  Tested version 8.0.608 (newer than what is listed here) with a single server and several clients. Can't import scripts from former versions (v6). Can't connect to any clients--before or after updating client software. Forget about updating clients from the server. Had to downgrade the client machines I tested as v6 displayed some weirdness with the newer clients. Since I couldn't actually connect to clients, I can't review script creation or execution. All in all, it feels like an early beta. Despite the problems with v6, it's definitely not worth upgrading at this point. Besides, the upgrade to v8 with 20 clients is nearly what I paid for v6 with 10 clients some years ago. The multi-threaded engine could make it worth the price, but I am unable to test it if I can't actually connect to clients...  
(Version 8.0.594)

DONMONTALVO  retrospect for mac is obviously no longer being developed. a shame, but not a problem. check out bru. the unix toolset is proven for over 20 years on the unix side. they ported to mac as a result of a request from nasa. the gui is maturing, and hopefully it'll soon reach the incredible level the underlying toolset.

emc is simply milking this cash cow.

don  
(Version 6.1.10.100)

DER~BOT~HAUS  So advanced it is years beyond HD's. Doesn't know what they are. Can't connect to LTO3/LTO4's either as they are also "not advanced". Can't recover to a computer reliably either. My company has used Retrospect for years. It has always kinda sucked. But it got the job done, slowly. Now it can't get the job done and I am starting to think about the cloud as a "quicker" way to backup. And I am saying a T1 is faster than this. How many thousand of dollars in maintenance have I spent on this turd? Way too many money's.  
(Version 8.1.662)