Comments on: EMC Retrospect anyone? Anyone?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:32:00 +0000

We are currently using retrospect fot approx 30 servers and 40 users. I definitively hate retrospect:
- poor or absent documentation
- poor tech support
- error logs almost not human redable
- easy backup set corruption, catalog corruption
- the requested attention is far more higher than other solutions
- actions to take are too often required
- it hangs
- the clients are crap. they crash frequently

Ok is a partisan spirit, but after 2 years in production I cannot sleep the night and I dream about the replacement (Bacula)

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 23 May 2008 23:30:00 +0000

Well I’ve tried several and retrospect IMO is by far the best. Acronis True Image is about the worst thing I’ve ever used, it’s bloated bugware! Tech support answers some of my emails over 2 weeks after I sent them!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 13:15:00 +0000

I’ve been using Retrospect 7.0 Single Server for about 1,5 years in a small environment (~10 clients, backups to server disk and iSCSI SAN). When it works it seems good but it has quite a few unstable parts. Grooming backup sets occasionally ends up making the backup sets unusable, and there are no solutions to many existing problems in the program.

Overall, I wouldn’t buy it again. Backups are just too important to trust to a program that may fail unexpectedly at any time.

By: gabe

gabe — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 03:22:00 +0000

I've been using Retrospect Workgroup Backup on OSX for about 3 years at Friends of the Mississippi River, backing up between 8 and 12 workstations in that time. Generally, it has served well, but needs to be checked periodically -- the occasional backup file corruption is a big drainer, but if you test your backups weekly (I do it by requesting a "random file" from a different staff person each week to restore). Retrospect's old "wake clients from sleep to backup" is gone, so until I implement some suggestions camping in my e-mail, people are leaving their computers wide awake all night -- sucks for saving power. Overall, I'd give it a 7 out of 10.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 02:23:00 +0000

I used retrospect for years at a 50 user NPO and loved it.

I have found people familiar with other back up programs find the model it uses difficult to get their head around sometimes. But it’s just different, not bad.

I never had any problems with backing up or restoring – it was great. Good defaults, lots of flexibility, and a good logging and reporting so you can double check what you think you’ve done

Not sure about all the add-ons like exchange server and such. I was mainly grateful for its ease of use over mixed Mac/Windows platforms.

Keep up the blog – it’s hugely helpful to your colleagues struggling in similar situations.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 20:13:00 +0000

We've been using Retrospect at our nonprofit for years.

We use the OS X version, to back up mainly OS X machines (and a windows machine). It works quite well. Some have trouble figuring out the GUI and the various configuration options, and while they're not particularly straightforward, it's fine once you figure it out.

I've never had trouble with it, and have done a handful of restores, with no problems.

The newest windows version is better that the current OS X one; it can now do disk-to-disk-to-tape, which may be important depending on your setup.

Configuring email notification can be a pain, it doesn't send emails natively but on OS X it uses AppleScript and a mail client to do so. Not sure what the windows version does.

I found it to be a solid and affordable, though I'm considering moving to BRU, mainly due to lack of D2D2T