| David Arnstein 2006-04-01, 12:31 pm |
| I just posted this review on Amazon.com. I gave it 3 stars (out of a
possible 5). Comments welcomed.
Backing up is not fun, but it is crucial. For a business, the reasons
are obvious. For a home user, consider that more and more of your
information is moving from paper to bits. Your snapshots, your music,
your bank records, the list keeps growing.
What sets backup software apart from other applications (such as word
processing) is that defects are extremely damaging. When Microsoft Word
weirds out, you just slam your fist down and start writing your document
again. If your backup software lets you down during a restore operation,
it is a genuine catastrophe.
So stable backup software is essential. My strategy has been to seek
out backup software that is marketed to both individual users, and
enterprises, the larger the better!
Backup software marketed exclusively to enterprises is too expensive.
Backup software marketed to individuals is unstable, just like (for
example) Microsoft Money. If your backup software is used by large,
powerful companies, then you can hope that these customers will be able
to get bugs fixed quickly. YOU don't have the clout to get bugs fixed,
but other customers do. You have to hope that the bug you find is making
life unpleasant for a large, powerful corporate customer.
I have found two packages that fit this description: Ultrabac and
Retrospect. Of the two, Retrospect has a much better feature set.
Retrospect has had a feature called "Progressive backup" which is unusual
(perhaps unique!) and extremely useful. Recently, Retrospect added a
feature called "pruning" which is revolutionary. Nice going Retrospect!
Now for the bad news. Version 6.5 of this software was quite stable.
Version 7.0 had a rather short life. I never used it, but when Version
7.5 appeared, its marketing literature contained a rather distressing
claim. Namely, that the "pruning" feature of version 7.5 is more stable
than the "pruning" feature of version 7.0.
What the marketing literature is saying is that Version 7.0 lived its
entire life in an unstable state. Apparently, no patches for Version
7.0 were able to correct this issue. The patches for Version 7.0 have
stopped appearing. Version 7.5 is a paid upgrade from 7.0, by the way.
Conclusion: EMC does not have a good attitude towards this product.
What about Version 7.5? I am using it now, and it is mostly OK. I really
enjoy the feature set, and I put it to good use. Unfortunately, I am
seeing some stability issues. I was getting some failures with "file"
backups (one of several types of backup available). This is a rather
obsolete type of backup, so I switched over to using "disk" backups
instead. Now I am getting some failures involving too-full disks and
pruning failures.
I complained about these issues on the Retrospect user forum, but I was
not happy about the response I got. I have noticed that the participation
in these forums by EMC employees has reduced dramatically in recent
monthes. This is not a good sign.
Time to switch to a different backup software package? It is too early
to say. I hope that EMC preserves this worthy product line. But for now,
I recommend that if you are using Version 6.5, then stick with it. If
you are not using any version of Retrospect, then consider alternatives.
--
David Arnstein | Have fun with your spams:
arnstein+usenet@pobox.com | http://www.bluesecurity.com
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