what should I do about Retrospect?

ellen's boy toy

This is very strange, and I'm really mad, but I don't know who to blame, Apple or Dantz? I switched my Grandfather over to an iBook 14" from a really old HP portable. He needs back up his data. So I bought him Retrospect 5.0.

In the process of setting up the software, I was shocked to find that Retrospect does NOT work with the built in CD/DVD drive!!!

What the f*****k?? That was six months ago, and I just assumed Retrospect would support the drive by its next update.

So just yesterday, I finally got a look at the supported CD drive list for Retrospect 5.1 and IT STILL DOES NOT SUPPORT THE DRIVE IN THIS IBOOK!

I cannot believe this. This is not some weird 3rd party CD drive. How could Apple let Dantz sell a backup product which doesn't work with a built in drive in one of its own iBooks???



any ideas whom I should complain to?



(I already understand that I can buy an external drive and all's well. But that is not the point. The point is how can Dantz STILL not support a CD drive which Apple has been using in one of its portables for over a year now?)



<rant>

I'm just so steamed about this whole switch attempt because the other applications my Grandfather relies on are Quicken and AOL. AOL on OS X is barely tolerable, while Quicken is a buggy, woefully lacking parity in features to the Windows version, horribly deficient in UI design piece of sh*t on the Mac. I guess having the CEO of Intuit on Apple's board does not mean Intuit must write good software for Mac. I have learned my lesson, and I will NEVER EVER help someone switch to Mac again)

</rant>

cubedude

Try helping him switch away from AOL, and I'm sure someone else here has a better alternative to Quicken.

kickaha

And Dantz REALLY dropped the ball with Retrospect on X, IMNSHO. There are very few reasons anyone should be even attempting to use it when there are plenty of good, simple, friendly back up solutions out there that cost much less.

pthfndr

Can you suggest what some of those other backup programs might be? I need to do a backup on my 15" Powerbook and am not sure what program I should take a look at. Thanks!

mania

here is my backup shell script to backup the User dir and mysql database to my spare hard disk (x-wing). i ended up commenting out the tar version and going with the dittto version cause tar doesn't save the stupid mac resource fork. or u can download xtar if u want compression. anyways put this script in /etc/periodic/daily and make it executable. one thing with ditto is it doesn't delete things you delete so you have to clean up the backup folder every now and then. it also doesn't compress but backing up user data should not be as bad as backing up a whole disk.



#!/bin/sh



# backup important things



# mysqldatabases

mysqldump --opt --user=username --password=password --all-databases > /Volumes/x-wing/backup/localhostmysqldata.sql



# backup User dir



# with tar

#tar cpzf /Volumes/x-wing/backup/Users.tgz /Users

# with ditto

ditto -rsrcFork /Users /Volumes/x-wing/backup/Users

kickaha

rsync only copies things it needs to (changed or new files) and has a veritable metric buttload of options (delete files on backup... or not... mirror to a 3rd directory based on two other sources... etc, etc, etc).



An HFS+ (ie, resource fork) aware version can be found at MacOSXLabs. This package comes with a GUI front end that does a reasonably good job of setting up most common options for the shell tool.



If set to go off nightly, it can back up my 80GB drive in under five minutes or so. The largest time sink is spent checking files. Since it's checksumming each with MD5, a quick CPU might help a touch.