EMC Purchases Dantz
John C. Welch contacted EMC and Dantz and ended up “open-minded, but cautious.”
EMC’s position on this is that the Mac market was one reason they bought Dantz. They realize that in the SMB world, there is a strong Apple presence, and that they have even less experience with the Mac market than they do with the SMB market. So they view Dantz as their best path to success in the SMB market.
Dantz’s point of view on this is that they’re getting access to more resources for Retrospect, which will allow them to concentrate those resources on their products, in particular, the Mac server product, which Larry Zulch admitted was as patched as it could be, and that they were working on, (no dates given, sorry) the replacement for the Mac server which will be, as he puts it, “a product done the right way.”
I upgraded to Retrospect 6, after all, because I missed its snapshots and good utilization of storage space. For regular backups to a local FireWire disk, it works great. However, it still doesn’t support optical drives that Apple itself is shipping, and the Duplicate feature, which I used to use for synchronization over the network, is useless as it messes up file ownership and permissions. These days, the only synchronization software that I’ve been able to use successfully is Synk. The current version uses hundreds of MB of RAM and is very slow, but apparently that will be fixed in 5.1.
