Retrospect Express Backup 4.3
Company: Dantz Development Corporation
Estimated Price: $44.95
(See the Dantz web site for free or inexpensive
upgrades for registered users of earlier versions
of Retrospect and Retrospect Express)
http://www.dantz.com
I use Retrospect Express every day to update the backup of my entire hard drive onto my splendid new SmartDisk VST USB/FireWire Hard Drive. (See https://www.mymac.com/nemo/vst_10.15.00.shtml for our review of this product.)
Each of my consulting clients is required to use RetroExpress at the beginning of every month, updating their “Storage Sets” (from earlier versions of the software) or “Backup Sets” from this latest v4.3 release.
I consider this utility application to be essential to my no exceptions policy on consistent, reliable backing up of ALL data.
Are you familiar with the probability ratio on computer data loss? Very simply: data loss happens in inverse proportion to data backup, meaning the 90+ percent of people who don’t backup regularly (if ever) will lose data at a rate tremendously higher than the fewer than ten percent of people who perform regular backups. Get my point? Good. Now get going!
I installed Retrospect Express Backup onto my new Ruby iMac DV at the beginning of October, and it has worked flawlessly since then. The cross-platform CD comes with a multi-lingual user guide, having Macintosh info in English on pages 13 – 28.
The application allows backing up onto removable media, plus CD-R, and CD-RW disks, or to the Internet, with “appropriate networking hardware or modem” and “an account with write privileges on an FTP site.” Dantz has gone out of its way to make RetroExpress compatible with every current backup destination.
I urge you to read thoroughly the entire 16 pages of instructions, in order to get everything going properly the first time, even if you are experienced with Retrospect Express. You will learn how to restore from the Backup Sets, which is crucial to using this software.
With version 4.3 Dantz added support for backing up to another fixed disk drive (previous versions only supported removable media and FTP backups). In edition to the Quick Start, Retrospect Express does include a full 317-page PDF manual on the CD.
Your first Backup Set takes a long time to create, compress, and verify (90 minutes for 3.1 GB in my case), but subsequent backups take only a few minutes to add the most recent items from your hard drive.
If you backup religiously, there is a high probability you will never need to restore your entire mountain of data, but everyone operates differently. In my case, I certainly work smarter and sleep better knowing the hard disk is safely backed up onto my removable drive, which is STORED OFF-SITE.
Heed these words carefully: get into the habit of using this affordable, reliable application, or suffer the inevitable consequences. Do as I say and as I do. You have been warned.
MacMice Rating: 5
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