Hard Drive Backups and Retrospect

>Does anyone have real-world experience of Retrospect and RSyncX?
>With more recent versions of Retrospect and MacOSX and newer
>hardware are
>my older concerns still valid?
>
>Jonathan

I use Retrospect. On Monday morning, my Powerbook was frozen, making
a grinding noise. Dead hard disk. It's being repaired at this moment
but I am not worried -- Retrospect backed up that machine and two
others in the house (one of them Windows) nightly.

So you are very right to worry about your little girl's pictures.

You can schedule a nightly hard disk copy to an external FireWire or
USB hard disk using a variety of means. I use Retrospect for its
versatility. In addition to the nightly backup to external disk
(which backs up everything), I back up user files only (no apps,
system, or such) to DVD each night. I have two DVD sets and keep one
at work, alternating each week. This gives me off-site backup in case
of fire or theft (if they take your computer, they will likely sweep
up all your gear, including your external drive and perhaps even
DVDs!)

To answer your questions:

>* Retrospect seemed slower than I expected based on the hardware I had.

I don't have a problem with that. The initial backup takes a long
time but after that, no problem backing up the whole house to two
backups every night.

>* Retrospect was finicky about the optical drive -- I had troubles
>with restores on occassion.

I had troubles recording to DVD. The drive was marginal and Apple
ended up replacing it under warranty. But in no case did Retrospect
make a bad recording -- the error was always detected at the attempt
to write.

>* I worried about a proprietary format and felt more comfortable with
>a 'Finder-readable' backup. I still occassional use my Finder-
>readable CDs but it's too much trouble to get things back out of my
>old backups.

Yes, Retrospect archives can only be read by Retrospect.

I don't find this a problem. I fire up Retrospect and type in file
names or whatever, it finds them, and restores them in seconds.

Jonathan Ploudre said:

>Does anyone have real-world experience of Retrospect and RSyncX? With
>more recent versions of Retrospect and MacOSX and newer hardware are
>my older concerns still valid?


This question comes up all the time among folks on the various Macintosh
e-mail discussion lists that I am on, and in the several Mac user groups
that I belong to.

When you speak about Retrospect, you have to be clear *which* version of
Retrospect you are speaking of, as there is than one version:
http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/homeandoffice/retroformac/
http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/homeandoffice/retroexpress/

Many folks find that the express version of Retrospect is too limited, or
that the desktop version is too hard to use.

There are several features that you may or may not want to look for in a
backup program:

Will the program create a bootable backup? It's really nice to be able
to boot from your backup and instantly resume your work if your main
drive dies. Downtime can be expensive in some work environments.

The question of archival backups (i.e. keeping multiple old copies of
files) comes up quite often. Certainly it can be a good idea to have an
archival backup instead of just a clone backup of your drive, because if
anything happens to your data on your main drive, a clone backup (where
old copies of files are not preserved) will only keep the most recent,
problematic version of your data.

However, archival backups take up more space, and they are not as well
suited for seamlessly taking up where you left off in your work if your
drive dies.

Not many backup programs can span a backup across multiple cartridges of
removable media. If you want to back up to, for instance DVD or CD, your
choices become quite limited. The same is true if you need to backup
over a network.

There are quite a few backup programs for OS X. Some of them are even
free. I can post a fairly complete list if you like. Here are the
programs that I've found that folks feel to be the most popular among
users. Note that they do not all have equivalent abilities:

SuperDuper $28
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
(Users find this program to be very easy to use.)

Carbon Copy Cloner (free, donation requested)
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

Intego's Personal Back-Up $60
http://www.intego.com/personalbackup/
(A fairly full-featured program that is easier to use than Retrospect.
Can back up to multiple removable disks.)

Impression $49
http://babelcompany.com/impression/
Can back up directories to multiple optical discs (CD-R, CD-RW, and
DVD-R) with multi-directory backups, incremental/differential backups,
and direct-to-disk archiving.





Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

On Mar 31, 2006, at 5:42 AM, Jonathan Ploudre wrote:

> Does anyone have real-world experience of Retrospect and RSyncX? With
> more recent versions of Retrospect and MacOSX and newer hardware are
> my older concerns still valid?

If you're attaching your backup drives to the same computer that's
running the backup (i.e. you aren't doing a network backup), then I'd
say that RsyncX is overkill. You can get the same functionality in a
MUCH simpler package by using SuperDuper! or Qdea's Synchronize Pro X.

Regardless, yeah, Retrospect has an interface that's rather dated and
strange, and it requires its own special drivers for optical drives
and can store files in a proprietary format.

However, you aren't using optical drives and you don't HAVE to store
files in a proprietary Retrospect archive; you can tell it to just
keep your files in the filesystem. You don't get the benefits of
compression, but recovery can be a lot easier (especially if you
don't have Retrospect handy.)

For network backups, RsyncX is great. Then again, so is Retrospect.

For myself, I used to use RsyncX, but then switched to Retrospect on
my networked backup server because I wanted to back up multiple Macs
and PCs to the same computer. Retrospect makes this simple, and the
handy client/server setup ensures that I get notified if my wife
hasn't successfully backed up in a while, so that I can force a
backup the next time she's available.

With rxyncX, I'd be stuck with Macs-only, and the backups wouldn't be
QUITE as reliable. Also, media rotation and stuff like that isn't
entirely well supported with RsyncX, although it can be forced to
work with a bit of monkeying.

Long rambling message, sorry. Good luck with your backup strategy.
Let me know if I can offer more insight. :)

--Nik

On 1/04/2006, at 12:42 AM, Jonathan Ploudre wrote:

We use Retrospect for backing up both Macs & PCs here at work

> * Retrospect seemed slower than I expected based on the hardware I
> had.

I can't vouch for its speed vs what you were used to. We find that
it takes a VERY long time to scan OS X machines because of the many,
many files. We figure it's probably because it's running on an old
400MHz G4. The Windows backups seam to be quicker but they are done
by an Athlon XP 1800+ with LOTS of RAM & 3 tape drives.

> * Retrospect was finicky about the optical drive -- I had troubles
> with restores on occassion.

Still is, if your drive isn't supported, forget it. Having said that,
once you find a supported optical drive, you should have no trouble
doing your restores.

hope this helps some

-------------------------------------
Jason Campbell
Technician
Psychology Department
University of Otago

On 02 Apr 2006, at 23:58 , Nik wrote:
> With rxyncX, I'd be stuck with Macs-only

Um... I backup to a freebsd machine, and I backup the FreeBSD machine
to the Mac.

> , and the backups wouldn't be QUITE as reliable.

How do you figure that?

> Also, media rotation and stuff like that isn't
> entirely well supported with RsyncX,

True, but one thing that you can do quite easily with rsync is make
diff backups.

Say, for example, you backup your system and you have a document that
is 50MB in size, and you've made some slight change to that
document. Normally, the entire document would be copied with an
incremental backup, but with a diff backup only the CHANGES to the
document are backed up.

I know people who keep a month's worth of incremental diff backups,
allowing them to quite easily roll back to previous versions of
documents with very little overhead. I don't do this myself, I just
do full rsync backups (since rsync only copies changed files) on a
weekly basis.

I have found Retrospect to be fussy about its parameters--if some name on the drive is changed, the backup will not run--but once it runs, it seems always to work, and its error messages are clear. In contrast, I have found RsyncX will always run but will not always back up all of the files that it is supposed to and its error messages are indecipherable. (Well, perhaps if I had Matt Neuburg's knowledge of Greek....)

I paid very good money for Retrospect and all I got from them is lip
when needing minor help from them. It follows that a software
dedicated to save you from disaster that has a terrible support is
not what I want for back up. I dumped Retrospect for a inexpensive
shareware that is supported so well that I became a fan and use every
opportunity to give then a well deserved plug. SuperDuper is a
fantastic back up software with wonder support. I have just finished
back up 2 Mac's in less than half an hour to Firewire Externals made
bootable. Why would anyone use Retrospect?
I am ready to transfer my Retrospect for a song. But you would be
stupid to do it. Get SuperDuper!

I have been using ChronoSync for over a year now and have been quite happy with it.

Since it is simply a Sync program, it creates Finder-readable files, so you'll have no problems retrieving a file from your external drive, but it does not, as a true "backup" app would do, create incremental backups to keep a history of files changed - whatever was the last state of a file before syncing to your firewire drive is what gets sync'd. It also has several options for syncing deleted files, one of which is to create an _Archive folder, so if you do accidentally delete a file, and don't discover it for awhile, you can find it again in your _Archive folder.

SO to be really safe, I segmented my external drive (which is very large) into two partitions, and use one for ChronoSync backups (of which there are two scheduled - one for my root drive including all system files and apps, and one for my /User/ files.

I use the other partition for the Mac Backup utility, which does create compressed incremental backups that can only be restored using Backup.

Both take only a short amount of time to setup, configure, and schedule. I regularly check to be sure both are working - so far no troubles.

I loved the earlier suggestion about using DVDs for user files and then storing it away from the computer - I'm going to start doing that right away!