Retrospect 8 for Mac ships, backup admins do dance of joy

*** Retrospect 8 Means Not Looking Back ***

EMC's announcement of Retrospect 8 for Mac highlights some "Important Information", namely that it doesn't run on PowerPC Macs, but that "of course" It still backs up PowerPC clients. So you figure they've disclosed the major limitations, and if you're on an Intel Mac you're OK to upgrade.

You would be wrong. Once you've purchased the software, you find out, either by trying to use it or by reading all the way to the bottom of the Read Me file that v8.0 will not recognize -- will not append to or restore from -- backups created with previous Retrospect versions! Is it not fundamental to a backup program to be backwards compatible? Apparently not. I'm supposed to keep using my old Retrospect 6.1 to append to and restore from my existing (large) set of AIT-5 tapes, and spend $3,000 for another set of backup tapes for use with v8.0.

Retrospect 8 will not import clients or scripts from previous Retrospect versions, and cannot access backup sets created by previous versions. It is not an "upgrade" in the usual sense: it is a different program, related to previous versions only by similarity of function and EMC's hope that existing users will buy it and only later discover the trouble and expense required to make use of it.

Note that Retrospect Server runs on 10.4.11, but the console app does NOT (it needs 10.5). Whoever thought of that as a solution should be flogged. Repeatedly.
I installed Retrospect 8 Server on the server and after 20 seconds the server crashed.
I restarted the server and Filemaker Server (on the same machine) did not start.
I went to my own machine, installed Retrospect Console and connected to the server to setup Retrospect Server. The console could not connect to the server.
The machine became unresponsive and crashed again.
I restarted the server, Filemaker was still not starting, Remote Desktop to the server stopped working and I could not stop Retrospect Server from System Preferences. Retrospect had 3 cores running at 100%.
I toggled the Retrospect Server option not to start at startup and rebooted.

So far, Retrospect (6 or 8) is the ONLY app that has crashed my server EVER. I can live with 6, since I can avoid most of the crashes by now.

You NEED to avoid 8.

I moved away from Retrospect about 5 years ago when a drive took a dump and it couldn't get a bootable restore from AIT tape. Never again, Retrospect!

Now I drive clone with Super Duper. Never had a problem.

I hate retrospect, ever since it wiped out a backup because it couldn't contact a server I have jumped ship. Netvault wasn't much better but it was a hodgepodge of hardware and software. I LOVE my Revinetix system, faster, cheaper and easily expanded and very reliable.

woah! Gigantic picture, for a blog post/ the way it is formatted.

We use a program called Restored for our backups and it works flawlessly. It takes super fast incremental backups and doesn't require any weekly full backups. It's also much cheaper than Retrospect. You can download from http://www.alpcorp.com/restored

I always found Retrospect to be craptastic at best.
Every version was buggy and every new version fixed the previous bugs and added new ones.

Pricing is cheaper if you buy through 3rd party vendors. Much cheaper.