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[quote Chupa Chupa]A very good reason not to use Retrospect Xpress. It's an old app that hasn't be updated in years. Years!
According to the website, it was updated 6 months ago.
[quote mattkime] They're two very different apps. SuperDuper and CCC make bootable clones of your drive. Retrospect will let you keep multiple historical revisions of your files, copying only what has changed. (somewhat similar to TimeMachine)
According to the User Guide, Retrospect Express (not Retrospect) does make bootable backups. And can be configured to do a smart backup, similar to SuperDuper.
Well, it looks like nobody here is really using Retrospect Express. I may test it out for a while, maybe as a secondary backup system. If I get the motivation, I'll try to report back what I've found.
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I got a copy with an external drive I bought, tried it and then reformatted the drive and redid the BU with SD. 'Nuff said. (Retrospect popped up somewhat cryptic error messages)
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I always found Retrospect very difficult to recover files from - which is what we installed and used the damn thing for in the first place!
Also, if you rotate backup media (hard drives in my case), the catalog file gets stored with the backup data. The catalog is required for making a recovery, and if you are trying to recover files from a catalog that doesn't match the latest log file that Retrospect has, you don't get anything recovered.
I of course found all of this out after I needed to recover a system that crashed hard. Investigated other options, and quickly switched to SuperDuper.
Jeff
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Except for a small number of people that are willing to go through the pain of learning how to use Retrospect for a complex backup situation and are willing to chain themselves to paying for upgrades every time Apple releases an update, I always recommend to use ANYTHING else.
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[quote Gutenberg]It has been a long time since I used Retrospect Express but my memory of it is endless frustration. Plus if I am remembering correctly, and there is no guarantee, it won't backup the system folder correctly. That was in OS9 though.
I have used Retrospect for many years and still do, don't know what you mean about not backing up the system folder correctly.
Yes, it's interface can be needlessly complex and I don't much like their customer support options, but it is a very deep program and it has never failed me (though sometimes the media has).
Still, CCC or SD will be fine for most users.
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I have Retrospect Express, which came with an OWC drive. For some reason, even though I scheduled regular backups, they don't occur.
For years before I used regular Retrospect on my OS 7-9 Macs, backing up to either Bernoulli disks or to external HDs. Originally simple to manage scripts, it seemed to grow more inscrutable over time.
Leopard's Time Machine worries be because it is said to delete old files when space gets tight. So it would be useless for archiving, right?
/Mr Lynn
