The first three editions of Take Control of Mac OS X Backups cover Retrospect, but none of them look at the new Retrospect 8. Read this excerpt from the fourth edition—due for release in just a few days—to learn the details of Joe's take on Retrospect 8.

Retrospect

By Joe Kissell

Retrospect, one of the oldest and best-known names in Mac backup software, has had a long and sometimes troubled history. For years, its status was rather dubious: it was, in terms of raw functionality, the most powerful Mac backup program you could buy—but also one of the most infuriating due to its arcane, outdated interface and a number of notorious bugs. Time passed; things changed. Without recounting the whole saga, the crucial fact is that with Retrospect 8, released in early 2009, the program has been completely rethought and redesigned (read Adam Engst’s article EMC Ships Modernized Retrospect 8, for more on the product’s renaissance). Since that time, development has continued at a furious pace, and the current version as I write this, 8.1.150, has regained most of the important features that were missing with version 8 as well as further interface enhancements and bug fixes.

Earlier versions of Retrospect had two components: the Retrospect application itself (which performed the backups, and also provided the user interface to control them), and the optional Retrospect Client, a small program you could install on another computer—Mac, Windows, or Linux—to enable Retrospect to back it up over your network.

Retrospect 8, by contrast, comes in three parts. The Retrospect Client is the same, but the erstwhile desktop application has been split into two pieces:

• Retrospect Engine is a program that runs silently in the background and does the actual work of backing up, verifying, and restoring files (you can turn it on or off using a pane added to System Preferences).
• The application now called Retrospect is what EMC refers to as a console, which means it provides the user interface for controlling what Retrospect Engine does.

The point of splitting the program into an engine and a console is that you can now put the two components on different computers if you want. The engine, for example, might be running on a server in a closet somewhere, while you install the console on your laptop to manage the program’s operation. More interestingly, you can use a single copy of the console application to manage multiple engines running on different computers. This arrangement makes Retrospect much easier to manage for administrators of large installations.

The flip side of this split, however, is that Retrospect becomes slightly more complicated to use on a single computer. Even if you have just one Mac, you must install both the engine and the console, and then tell the console to connect to the copy of the engine running on your own computer. It’s not a huge inconvenience, but it’s more awkward than simply running a single program.

To say that Retrospect’s user interface has been improved is an enormous understatement. Gone are the endless layers of separate windows that made finding your way around an immense hassle. In their place is a single, modern-looking window split into sensible panes and tabs, with easily understood dialogs for configuring features such as scripts and rules. Even Retrospect’s terminology got a major overhaul, so the program’s operation is in most respects more obvious. For example, “selectors” (which could either include or exclude files) are now called “rules,” and the ambiguously named “Backup Server” feature is now called “Proactive Backup.” However, I find some changes a step backward (what was formerly “duplicate,” for example, is now the less-specific “copy”), and “scripts”—specifications for backup operations—keep the same name, even though they don’t resemble what the rest of the world calls “scripts” (procedures written in an English-like language such as AppleScript).

Meanwhile, the program’s infrastructure has also undergone significant improvements. It now runs natively on Intel processors and many (but not all) PowerPC processors, uses memory and CPU resources more efficiently than before, and improves its throughput for certain types of storage devices. It can also combine multiple hard disks into a single logical backup device. Many long-standing bugs have been repaired, too (although it’s not yet back to the bulletproof standard the product once enjoyed). It now also has the capability to wake up sleeping Macs on a network when it’s time for their backup (a feature called Wake-on-LAN).

If you look at the overall feature list, though, Retrospect’s underlying capabilities have remained largely the same—which is a good thing. It still supports all the essential backup operations plus a large number of capabilities that may be overkill for a home or small-office user, but which enterprise customers depend on. It works with an enormous number of storage devices (you can see and search the full list in the Retrospect Device Support Database at http://www.retrospect.com/supportupdates/technical/retrospect/device/), and EMC does seem to be paying greater attention to adding support for new devices in a timely manner. One interesting exception: although Retrospect 6.1 supported FTP servers as a destination, Retrospect 8.1 doesn’t—but the company promises that FTP support will return to the program soon. Another exception, which is significant enough that I wanted to highlight it in its own sidebar, is optical drive support, discussed next.

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Retrospect 8 and Optical Drives

Retrospect has always had exemplary support for optical drives such as CD and DVD recorders. Even during the time when I couldn’t generally recommend Retrospect as a backup solution, I still praised it as the best option by far for people who need to make versioned backups onto optical discs. Retrospect 8 maintains all the existing features for working with optical drives, and nothing in the user interface suggests any problem at all. You can see your optical drives, configure their options, and create media sets with “Optical” as their type.

However…

As of Retrospect 8.1.150, at least, EMC has disabled support for optical drives. If you run a backup script that uses an optical disc as a destination, you’ll see a blinking icon asking you to insert media, but when you try to do so, nothing happens. Retrospect doesn’t see any disc you insert, and if you have a PowerMac or a Mac Pro, it won’t even open the drawer on your SuperDrive.

The reason for disabling this feature, according to EMC, is a bug in Mac OS X that keeps Retrospect from handing over control of the optical drive to other applications when needed. They promise that this problem will be resolved in a future update.

In the meantime, if you need to use Retrospect with an optical drive, you can follow a fairly simple procedure to re-enable optical support (changing one digit in a text file, and then restarting Retrospect Engine). Find instructions for doing so at http://kb.dantz.com/display/2n/index.asp?r=9720 (if the URL doesn't work, try searching in the EMC Dantz Knowledgebase on "optical drive"). However, the downside of doing this is that you may be unable to use your optical drive outside Retrospect unless you turn off Retrospect Engine.

Once optical drive support returns to Retrospect (whether through a change in Mac OS X or in Retrospect itself), I’ll be happy to resume recommending the program as the ultimate tool for those who must back up to optical media. Until then, the program is in an odd limbo state between best and worst optical drive support!

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Given the fact that Retrospect has been dramatically resurrected, in the process addressing most of the concerns that prevented me from recommending it in the last couple of versions of this book, is it now back on my A-list? Is Retrospect once again the only backup software you need ever consider? Well, not exactly. My opinion of the latest version of Retrospect I’ve tried (leaving aside the niggling issues of optical drive and FTP support) is that it’s a perfectly capable, well-rounded backup program with a clear and reasonable user interface. If this version of Retrospect had existed four or five years ago, I would have told you not to even think about using anything else.

However, in the intervening years, the rest of the Mac backup world has moved on. Partly to fill in the gap left by Retrospect during the time it wasn’t actively being developed, a new crop of backup software has emerged. Innovative programs like Time Machine and CrashPlan appeared on the scene, and existing programs like Data Backup and Personal Backup X5 received dramatic improvements. In fact, as I’ve mentioned a few times already, the overall number of Mac backup programs has ballooned to more than 100—giving users a far wider range of options than they ever had before.

Many of these new or updated programs have taken advantage of new technologies and new ways of thinking about backups, both at a low level and in terms of how users interact with their backups. Simple, intuitive interfaces (like that of Time Machine) put even Retrospect’s glossy new look to shame. Sub-file updates, passive scanning (using FSEvents or otherwise), continuous backups, and pervasive support for online destinations such as S3 have become the norm. In all these areas and more, Retrospect is still behind the times—at heart, it still acts like a previous-generation backup program.

Don’t misunderstand me—there’s nothing wrong with backing up files the way we did a decade ago. It still gets the job done. But now there are faster, more flexible, and vastly easier-to-use programs to choose from—and, I must point out, available at a much lower price than Retrospect. So I have a hard time coming up with a compelling explanation as to why Retrospect is a good choice for the average individual user. For most ordinary people, you can get the job done more quickly, more easily, and less expensively with other software, such as Time Machine and SuperDuper (or any of numerous other combinations).

But maybe you’re not an ordinary individual user. One area in which Retrospect still outshines all its competition is in network backups. If you have to back up a handful of Macs—or even dozens or hundreds—over a network, then it’s still (or again) the gold standard. Sure, there are other enterprise-grade programs out there, and some of them quite good, but whereas Retrospect is excessively complicated for users with just one or two Macs, it’s among the simplest and most easily comprehensible solutions for larger-scale use. If you need to use a tape drive, magneto-optical drive, or other specialized storage hardware, Retrospect is also an ideal choice. And, once Retrospect’s optical drive issue gets resolved, I presume it will again be the very best option for backing up to optical media (including newer formats such as Blu-ray).

Retrospect comes in several versions. For the purposes of this book, the one you’re most likely to care about is Retrospect Desktop ($129, or $249 with a one-year support and maintenance agreement), which includes three licenses for Retrospect Client—meaning it can back up the Mac it’s installed on plus up to three other computers. Additional licenses for Retrospect Client, should you need them, start at $39 each. Retrospect Single Server and Retrospect Multi Server are designed to handle larger numbers of clients (and are correspondingly more expensive) and perform multiple backup and restore operations at once, but otherwise share the same features as the Desktop version. For more details on the Retrospect line of backup software, visit http://www.retrospect.com/products/software/retroformac/.

If you’re still stuck using Retrospect 6.x (perhaps because you need to run it on a PowerPC Mac that isn’t yet supported by Retrospect 8), see the Online Appendixes, in which I offer advice to ease your initial configuration of the previous version of the program.

—Posted by Joe Kissell on September 16, 2009