Retrospect Inc. has released Retrospect 13, a major new release of the backup software that adds support for integrated cloud backup to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and other Retrospect-certified cloud storage providers (a full list is available from the Retrospect Web site.
Retrospect was a fantastic app back in the 90s. Then they seemed to drop the ball, and the Mac OS X versions never appealed to me. This new version looks like an interesting development.
Incidentally, while developing this plan I tried out my copy of Aperture Exporter. It didn’t go well. AE creates keywords in Aperture for things like image-album relationships; in my case that resulted in very large numbers of keywords. Probably more than Aperture was ever tested to handle, more than enough to prove the UI doesn’t handle scrolling. If I use AE on the future it will be with a temporary copy of my Library, not the original.
I found Aperture Exporter essential in my migration to Lightroom. This is because Aperture’s own export doesn’t preserve the folder structure. Lightroom’s Aperture importer brings in your low-quality previews—I don’t even have previews, to save disk space—and also doesn’t preserve the hierarchy. Lightroom’s importer is based on PySQLite and feels more like a script than a part of the application; it can’t be canceled.
Aperture Exporter preserves a lot more metadata, but keyword explosion is definitely something to watch out for. I ended up exporting my library into five sub-libraries (that share the same masters). That way, the extra keywords didn’t affect anything in Aperture if I needed to use it again. And dividing the library made the exporting more manageable because Aperture Exporter likes to operate on a whole library.
There were some issues:
