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Retrospect is one of those companies that reminds me of Quark: they either never saw all of the money they leaving on the table, or they didn't care. In the case of Retrospect, all it would've taken would have been to create a GUI that made logical sense.
Probably the best eBook ever written on backing up (Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, by Joe Kissell) eventually gave Retrospect the highest rating of all of the dozen backup apps, but even he talked about how scary-bad its interface was.
I stopped using it years ago because it made me nervous. Actually, I always felt stupid, like I could never quite be sure if I was doing things correctly. Drove me nuts and I just didn't need the pressure. Switched to CCC and then SuperDuper, and those work fine.
Read Joe's e-book if you get the chance. It's damn good and really goes into the pros and cons of Retrospect.
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The first time I attempted regular back ups a few years ago, I started using Retrospect. Its interface is extremely confusing and I still read the manual.
Long story short, during a manual back up which I thought was going to do an incremental back up and make a separate file, I ended up overwriting my entire graduate school thesis including 20 GB of video work and an extremely long paper. It's similar to the hell that PeterB experienced last week.
Thankfully, I was getting a bit frustrated at my thesis anyway and wanted to change it or leave grad school. I can laugh now...Not really, there was some really beautiful video & photography work in there.
Anyway, that scared me off using a program to do back ups and now I only do them about once a month or so manually. Yes, scary. I'm only now going to invest in a program again and it will probably be SuperDuper.
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I used Retrospect on OSes 7-9 for a number of years, on networked Macs, and so became relatively accustomed to the interface (I would back up to a Bernoulli drive, which I still have in a drawer). Used to be the basic version gave you three free clients, which was handy. Then they started charging a lot for a network version, and I started getting errors for having too large a catalogue, or something. As I moved over to OS X, I stopped using my old OS 9 Retrospect.
Just started with Retrospect Express, which is fairly simple, like Retrospect v. 1 or 2, but limited to one machine. (This came with an OWC HD, or two, one copy I'm still looking for—if you don't send the disk with your returned drive, OWC charges you $29, but that's a separate tale.) Because I was familar with the older versions, I understood the scripting process, but I expect new users will be scratching their heads. The scans for even the incremental backups take a long time, so you've got to leave the computer running overnight if you don't want to get slowed down when you're working.
What I'd really like is an inexpensive and intuitive program that will enable me to back up data from a mixed home/home-office network of Macs and PCs, and do it transparently. The full network version of Retrospect will do this, but it isn't inexpensive, and it's not terribly intuitive. EMC/Dantz charges for tech support (they have a forum, but it's dominated by high-end IT guys and inscrutable to laymen like me).
I assume Apple's forthcoming Time Machine will handle only one computer. If it's anything like Apple's clunky Backup.app, forget it.
/Mr Lynn
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Retrospect is the worst major-market backup solution of the last ten years. It's not simply complex, it is complex without benefit to the user. The complexity brings nothing, not stability, reliability, flexibility... only difficulty and uselessness.
It has failed for me so many times, in multiple workplaces on systems from OS 9 to 10.3.9, from personal machines to an Xserve that I would never suggest it to anyone. It has failed with tape media and optical, backing up 50 megs and backing up 300 gigs. It has failed to restore and frequently failed to simply even start up.
It does nothing well.
Anything is better than Retrospect.
Does that cover it? 
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Personally, I'd say if you're going to ship something with your drives/enclosures, ship CCC or similar. I tried to use Retrospect on a Windows machine and was not impressed. I use Veritas Back Up Exec 10 for my servers at work. I'm backing up about 215 Gb to tape and to Hard Drive every night. It is pretty simple in comparison to Retrospect. CCC is much simpler and gets the job done without any fuss. That is what most users would probably want anyway. If a person is depending on the files for their income and livelihood they should be able to figure out a more versatile method if they need it.
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Scary stories here... I just started using Retrospect Express that came with my OWC DVD drive, to back up to an external FW drive, and now I have second thoughts about the whole thing...
First backup took about one hour, second (incremental) backup took only a few minutes, and restoring a few files (just as a test) seemed to work OK.
I choose to backup only the user folders (I don't need all the Apps and Libraries), but even in the user folders there is a lot of junk (another Lib folder with thousands little files). I wish Retrospect would let me choose which folders to backup, i.e. docs and pictures, not the entire home folder, but I couldn't figure out how to do that.
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[quote space-time]. . . I wish Retrospect would let me choose which folders to backup, i.e. docs and pictures, not the entire home folder, but I couldn't figure out how to do that.
There are very few file-selection options in Retrospect Express, compared with the full version of Retrospect. However, you can use a label color to exclude folders you don't want to back up.
/Mr Lynn
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After the first backup - backups following just cover files that have changed - which is why first takes so long and and after it's quick.
[quote space-time]Scary stories here... I just started using Retrospect Express that came with my OWC DVD drive, to back up to an external FW drive, and now I have second thoughts about the whole thing...
First backup took about one hour, second (incremental) backup took only a few minutes, and restoring a few files (just as a test) seemed to work OK.
I choose to backup only the user folders (I don't need all the Apps and Libraries), but even in the user folders there is a lot of junk (another Lib folder with thousands little files). I wish Retrospect would let me choose which folders to backup, i.e. docs and pictures, not the entire home folder, but I couldn't figure out how to do that.
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I get the Retrospect.... Awesome backup application - but horrible GUI can lead to non-use or incorrect use defeating the purpose.
Any thoughts on Prosoft Backup?
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I have two complaints about Retrospect:
I. Like much Mac software, seems to be their poor release timing of $$$ incremental upgrades to happen around major OS releases WITHOUT including support for that OS revision. C'mon, these folks can't shell out $500 a year for an Apple Developer Select membership to get OS betas to test against and build stable versions for? I'm sick of "New version XYZ!!!" coming out but not including support for the latest OS and having to wait for an update. I'm thinking of the versions 5,6 retrospect releases and the 10.3->10.4 timeframes here.
II. Dantz/EMC tries too hard for device specific hardware support while ignoring more generic and effective methods. Case in point, back in 2002 I was trying to use Retrospect 5 to back up onto DVD-R... If I had 10 GB of data it would do one of the following:
1. Burn 2 GB to the first disk, 1 GB to three successive disks, 500 meg to 4 more disks... at which point I would stop the process due to flagrant waste.
2. Try to burn a disk and tell me my drives weren't supported or qualified. C'mon, it's a FireWire device (or, to tape drives, SCSI connection; the data is binary... whatever error checking algorithms Retrospect is using must be more sensitive than military-grade encryption...)
I eventually switched to using the hard drive backup method, just using DVD-sized disk images instead; that seemed to work well, except that Retrospect would randomly unmount the disk images while updating the catalog when 2.24 GB, 248 MB, and 5 MB were left available on the disk. I would then burn those DVD images to DVD with Disk Utility without any problems and was able to use them for recovery just fine - never had a problem (and didn't need to worry about having proprietary Dantz drivers just to READ the media.)
My memory on the subject's a bit fuzzy since my admin days are waning behind me... it just seemed like someone could do a much better job of backup; however, my experience with things on Windows isn't much better so it must be the KINDS of people who usually write and use backup software that are keen to implement all these ugly GUIs and weird driver-specific implementations.
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