Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Retrospect 13

Agen G. N. Schmitz:

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.

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Sounds a lot like Arq on the surface...

Interesting is that they don't support Amazon Glacier (probably because of the complexity the restore workflow would add), but they do support Basho Riak S2, which lets you setup your own S3 clone.

I used Retrospect way back in the 90s when it was definitely the best Mac backup available. They completely lost the plot for many years. But I've been using them again for the last five years, and for multiple machine backup to multiple rotating harddisks, I don't think there is anything comparable. I can't use a network backup (Australian bandwidth limits the possibilities of doing full backups over the network), so backing up locally and then rotating the disk off site is the only practical solution.

Retrospect certainly is not the easiest backup system to use, but it is one of the most comprehensive, and definitely worth a look.

@Sean Yes, but if it’s anything like the Retrospect of old, it has way more options for controlling what is backed up and for searching/browsing files to restore.

If you try Retrospect hope you write about it. I also liked it in 90s, gave up on it in 00s.

@John I’m happy with Arq and CrashPlan right now, so not planning to try it. But I’d love to read more about it from people who have.

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