He’s been a Mac guy since the early eighties (he had a Lisa, for crying out loud), and doesn’t ask too much of his systems. A second try at a backup yielded the same results 15 minutes later, so I called, the company that makes Retrospect. Retrospect refused to recognize the first disc, despite having written to it only moments before. “Hm,” I thought, “perhaps CLIENT just did something weird.” Ah, no. Retrospect dutifully started copying his user directory to a CD, ran out of space, asked for a second one, finished the backup, and then asked for the first one again in order to verify the backup. I killed a few stray processes, and then tried to do a backup. I ran some tests, since I feared the worst, but I couldn’t find anything wrong with the machine, either with the hardware or the drive itself. In no case did Retrospect make a usable backup. He’d been getting all sorts of weird errors when he tried to do backups, and his computer crashed when he tried to run DiskWarrior to investigate the claims Retrospect made about various failures. Well, as I said, he called me yesterday, and I went out to his office this morning. Then I said something I regret: “I hear good things about.” Ooops.
RETROSPECT 8 0 SERIAL NUMBER SOFTWARE
I mirror my stuff across a couple drives, and I burn CDs of key directories pretty regularly, so that software niche isn’t something I have firsthand knowledge of, and I told him so. He wanted total fire-and-forget, and he wanted to be able to span CDs, since his user directory had grown beyond a single CD’s capacity (due primarily to pictures of a certain baby girl, I’m certain). Since he’s a friend’s dad (and a friend in his own right), I really see him socially more than I see him professionally, but a week or so ago he called me and asked what sort of backup software I suggest to folks. He’s the odd duck in my client roster, since I do no development for him I just do desktop support. Yesterday, I got a call from one of my clients to come out and help him with his backups. For esoteric database servers, that’s okay.įor backup software - something everyone ought to be using - it’s absolutely inexcusable. Companies market these products as easy-to-use, but a huge percentage of the time, it’s so broken, unusable, or just plain confusing that someone like me has to get involved. It’s a rant about some specific software, but it’s also a rant about the fact that normal humans still can’t just buy software that does a job and expect it to work, for the most part.