Retrospect Reviews17.0.2.101

This has become overpriced crapware. I bought it several months back, carefully considering whether Retrospect was worthy of consideration after they had dropped support for the Mac years back. I used to use it to back up to optical media and a tape drive before (then Dantz) decided to change their catalog format to a backwards-incompatible format, drop optical media support and then dropped Mac support entirely.

Since I've bought it, primarily to back up drives to B2 storage, this app has been nothing but trouble. It loses its settings on quit, doesn't recognize that it has been given full disk access, doesn't start the Engine on startup even though it is checked to do so in Retrospect's System Preferences panel or adding it directly to login items. Directly trying to launch the Engine results in an instant crash. Trying to start Retrospect proper yields a message "connecting to 127.0.0.1" that is an endless loop of nothing happening.

I have spent hours via email and phone support on this piece of garbage. I'm giving the phone support people one more chance tomorrow, then I'm going to ask them to revoke my license and refund my money. Even their support materials show screen shots that are versions and versions of macOS old and their support material is not up to date, especially regarding cloud backups. I've spent 98% of my time with this app troubleshooting instead of backing up. EPIC fail!

I was using ChronoSync to B2, but upload speeds were horrible using that app. I may have to revert to that despite its slowness.

CAVEAT EMPTOR!

This has become overpriced crapware. I bought it several months back, carefully considering whether Retrospect was worthy of consideration after they had dropped support for the Mac years back. I used to use it to back up to optical media and a tape drive before (then Dantz) decided to change their catalog format to a backwards-incompatible format, drop optical media support and then dropped Mac support entirely.

Since I've bought it, primarily to back up drives to B2 storage, this app has been nothing but trouble. It loses its settings on quit, doesn't recognize that it has been given full disk access, doesn't start the Engine on startup even though it is checked to do so in Retrospect's System Preferences panel or adding it directly to login items. Directly trying to launch the Engine results in an instant crash. Trying to start Retrospect proper yields a message "connecting to 127.0.0.1" that is an endless loop of nothing happening.

I have spent hours via email and phone support on this piece of garbage. I'm giving the phone support people one more chance tomorrow, then I'm going to ask them to revoke my license and refund my money. Even their support materials show screen shots that are versions and versions of macOS old and their support material is not up to date, especially regarding cloud backups. I've spent 98% of my time with this app troubleshooting instead of backing up. EPIC fail!

I was using ChronoSync to B2, but upload speeds were horrible using that app. I may have to revert to that despite its slowness.

CAVEAT EMPTOR!

Once upon a time.... this was my goto backup protocol. Fast copy to external HD, high degree of file/folder selection/synch/backups etc etc then prog started playing up, dev was less than responsive and prices for single users became silly, so it was bye bye Retrospect. A once-great product that has withered and has been replaced by plenty of better/cheaper/faster apps. Pass on Retrospect and look around for alternatives - plenty of said cheaper/better/faster out there!

For $136, one could purchase ChronoSync •and• Carbon Copy Cloner •and• SuperDuper... plus still have enough cash left over for a burger. -HI-

Uploading to Backblaze B2 is still terrible in 14.5. Speed 1.4 MB/sec on a 500 Mbps line. Both Retrospect and Backblaze Support don't seem to care as I reported these issues to them ages ago and of course nothing has been done about it.

Retrospect has now been working again for some time.

Old time Mac users, will remember Retrospect as the go-to Mac backup program. However, Retrospect fell on hard times as a sequence of new owners seemed more interested in milking revenue from the customer base, than investing in a quality product. There was a period of literally years, where it was junk.

However, now that it has been spun off and is no longer part of some big company, it now is working again, and each new release seems to bring improvements. Hopefully, they will reform their pricing model, which still charges a very hefty premium for backing up any Mac running Apple’s $19.99 server app. Still, it is now, again, a program that you should consider.

I am looking forward to seeing what this new version brings.

Retrospect is really a good backup product. Here is the coupon: http://couponcode0.com/category/vendors/retrospectinc

Works as advertised for *moi*. Minus one star for not sticking with the Instant Scan Off settings (done in the Retrospect Pref Pane nowadays) after updates. Nota Bene: I know there have been problems with the Instant Scan feature, but I have it switched off anyway because it doesn't fit with my work flow.

Retrospect used to be *the* backup software. Back when I used to backup to tape (and SCSI-Terminator Voodoo was part of the game), perhaps with an Iomega or TEAC tape drive. I just came back to see how it had evolved because I am looking for a better way to back up the mountain of image data accumulating on the server. Ugh. It seems Retrospect has not aged well. Or rather, it has not progressed much from when I used it. It may be that Retrospect is not aimed at small businesses. Or that the kind of backups I use now is not within Retrospect's core solution (for example, I have no high security requirements for my backups). In any event, it seems that I get better results (i.e. not having to mess with proprietary archive formats) using a combination of Time Machine, and simple mirroring to a remote RAID. YMMV.

Backing up to a proprietary format with an awful GUI - NO THANKS. I just barely managed to recover my backups from retrospect a few years ago and will not be going back.

Wow...Retrospect is now its own company. There may be hope after all! :) Don

I've used Retrospect since OS 9 and this is by far the best version. It works so much faster than version 6. Restores could not be easier. I noticed comments below that restores of single files are difficult or impossible. Just use the search option and pick the file or files you want to restore and it puts the files in a folder under Macintosh HD or overwrites the file if you choose. I recommend it highly. It is simply unbelievable how much faster than version 6 was at doing backups. It never crashes, hangs or double launches. It is simply rock solid.

I'm still using Retrospect 5 on OS 9 but after listening just now to The Tightwad Tech podcast they talked about a neat open source backup program called BackupPC, which makes we want to try it out. http://www.thetightwadtech.com/2010/09/22/episode-13-backuppc/ Sounds like a good retrospect alternative for command line Mac geeks. Doesn't have a GUI :(

Changing my review to 1 star. There is an occasional bug that causes a script to forget which dataset it belongs to. Additionally, another bug forgets your sources as well. Of course when these things happen, your backups get screwed up, so FYI. Better yet, stay away unless you are desperate.

I recently had to recover some files from an old Retrospect backup, made with version 6. The one positive thing to say is that eventually the support team managed to get me set up to recover my files. The other positive thing is that the program is quite capable, it is just nearly impossible to efficiently use it. The troubles with Retrospect are legion, as noted by other reviewers. Major problem areas include: UI: The user interface is extremely un-mac like. Error messages are often obscure. Windows don't come to the front properly. Compatibility: The program uses its own drivers for block devices, which makes it a real pain to find a device it works with, particularly with optical drives. The new version 8 is incompatible with archives from older versions, like 6. Support: My initial requests for assistance were responded to, 4 business days later, with a minor modification of a standard response. The only way I was able to recover older backups was to install an old version of the software and then locate an older drive supported by that version of the software. The developer really ought to realize this dog has had his day. Provide some basic support for existing customers and come up with a responsible retirement schedule.

With the advent of cloning software and the use of inexpensive external hard drives, I feel Retrospect is not long for this world and on the way to its demise,

AVOID RETROSPECT AT ALL COSTS. If your company depends on reliable and restorable backups - look elsewhere. Our production facility has invested thousands of dollars in site fees and upgrades, and whenever we really need a Retrospect backup to save our bacon - it FAILS. Retrospect is slow, buggy, unreliable in network settings, and unable to restore even simple storage sets. Gawd forbid you need to restore from an older storage set. There is no excuse for current owner, (insert name here), to keep milking the same dead cow -- move on and create something fresh, new, slim, and reliable. Use this product at your own peril.

Wow, quite a range of opinions here. I posted here last year when I began beta testing of Retrospect 8. I certainly had some issues in the beginning, many of which are now resolved. This week, I completed our transition away from BRU 1.2 (a fine product, just not for me). I have 18 clients (so far) backed up to the Retro server on our LAN - a mix of Mac and Win Servers. Backup performance looks good. With a Xeon 2.8 Quad as the server (with FC connected RAID systems for storage - no tapes), I'm seeing throughput averaging around the 1GB/min mark. The performance numbers are a bit erratic, apparently affected by client specs, and number and size of files on the source. The peak was an OS X client (also a 2.8 Quad xserve) clocking in at an overall 2.1 GB/min on a 51 GB backup. Our servers are all connected to the same HP Procurve 5400 series switch via two bonded 1Gbit Enet ports. Although the new user interface has some quirks (try sorting on the Performance column of Activities, for instance), it's a big improvement over Retrospect 6. The grooming feature makes our backup strategies simpler to define - no more regular backup-set recycling needed (as in 6). Having the admin GUI as a separate client, meshes with our goal of having none of our servers logged into an account. My favorite improvement over 6 is the ability to run multiple simultaneous backups. I still try to limit the overlap, and have backups split between two RAIDs to minimize drive thrashing. There's certainly room for improvement. I encourage users to post feedback to the appropriate forum and file bug reports. The EMC guys seem genuinely motivated to make a good backup product. They've acted quickly on my bug reports and provided good feedback. Someday I'd like to see integrated tools for building restoration boot disks. An easy-to-use slim restore client for end users would be welcome too (browser-based perhaps). So, give Retrospect another try. The current release really does work! Just make sure you put your catalog files on a volume with plenty of extra space. Cheers.

After 8 months of total hell with unreliable and incomplete backups with Retrospect 8 (see my posts in the EMC Retrospect 8 forum under the name "scotty321" for all of my hell with the product, along with the hundreds of other users who are also having problems with this product), I have FINALLY found my replacement backup software and am now gladly & happily saying goodbye to Retrospect for good! I am now using ChronoSync and ChronoAgent for my backup software. I'm using them successfully at multiple different office locations, including one office location that has 17 Macs on their network. ChronoSync and ChronoAgent work absolutely flawlessly on a nightly basis to multiple external hard drives. In fact, ChronoSync and ChronoAgent do EVERY SINGLE THING that Retrospect 8 does (except backup Windows clients)... but they do it elegantly, they do it with better error reporting, they do it with a much better user interface, and they do it with significantly better pricing as well. You can backup an entire network of 25 Macs for only $190, with no upgrade fees ever! So, goodbye for life, Retrospect... you have burned way too many bridges with me and have caused me way too much grief for any one person to have in their lifetime.

This software is awful. Haven't been able to get a single backup since I installed it, as it always locks up when loading a tape. The Retrospect Engine then hogs the cpu at over 90% and when you try and force quit the engine, the whole server locks up. This was installed on a brand new fresh installation of Leopard server, so I know the system is fine. POS software.

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.

Why is the preference pane still 32-bit? Come on!

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.

They really are trying hard to make me not buy this upgrade. Still no DVD support. I have a bank of DVD burners just for Retrospect. But this new version still does not support optical media and will not, apparently, any time soon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

I've only just recently installed 8.0.594. Ultimately, I'll test this will multiple Mac and Win servers backing up to a 9TB FC-RAID. I'm just so impressed by the new GUI, I wanted to mention it now instead of waiting for the test results. EMC waited quite a while do anything with Retrospect Mac after it was purchased from Dantz. However, once the public beta started, the speed of bug fix releases was spritely. From that pace, and the lively interactions on the EMC beta forum, it's apparent they are taking this product seriously. I'm cautiously optimistic and look forward to posting some real world results.

I've been using retrospect as the backup solution with all my clients, ranging from single-user consultants to 70+ person organizations, and have always been thrilled with it. Unlike others here, I don't upgrade any mission critical machines to the newest OS release until after the first couple months in the wild and, by following that mantra, have never had any problems. It can connect to a host of clients through a variety of methods, the backup sets can be modified as I need, and the device compatibility list grows by the week.