UPDATE 24 March 2009: Retrospect 8 for Mac OS X has been released. So, given the limitations of Leopard’s Time Machine, it might be worth a look…
…At least in our office. With the imminent arrival of Leopard, my attention’s turned to the upgrade process. At the moment, the only application that I can foresee having problems is Retrospect. No real reason for that, other than it’s not Universal and is generally old and clunky! But Time Machine might take care of most of our backup needs pretty simply, so I’m considering just ditching Retrospect. The only snag is that we do offsite backups with Retrospect – every week I retrieve one drive and send the other.
So how to replicate the offsite part of the backup system? If Time Machine supports multiple drives and therefore Multiple backups, it would be simple. Perhaps an online system, e.g.: .Mac or S4? Is Apple doing this to drive more customers to .Mac?
I’m in two minds about the departure of Retrospect, it really is flexible and it has done a great job, but the interface is arcane and non-Intel native (and with no upgrade in sight!). It also requires a bit of administration overhead, so I’m angling to reduce that and go for a more Mac-like backup experience – it should just work!
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It would be great if we could have a brand new Retrospect version:
– Truly Mac-like interface. The current interface is anti-intuitive and awkward.
– Native for Mactel.
Yes, and the retrospect site at emcinsignia.com is just as anti-intuitive, so finding support information or even version updates is time-consuming. But Retrospect was up until very recently the best option for Mac backup as far as I can tell, especially on a Network. If Apple could ship an enhanced version of Time Machine that would handle multiple external Time Machine backups (so you could take one offsite at a time) then I’d go for that.
I’m now thinking I’ll use Time Machine for local backups, Flash Drive for dailies, and another external drive for weekly snapshots to go offsite…