Retrospect Upgrade policy and DROPBOX a Rant & Moan

[andymac]

Just wondered if anyone can help me justify the cost of the latest Retrospect upgrade to Mac13.

 

I purchased Mac12.5 less than 12 months ago and now it is more money to keep up to date. Come on Retrospect – less than 12 months is a joke to pay again. Small business can't keep affording these upgrades.

 

And then there is DROPBOX.

Retrospect has proudly announced that it is now a Dropbox Partner. As a Dropbox user I was keen to see how I can use the new set up. Basically I can't...

As a small business with just 2 Macs I would need to use Dropbox for Business. Dropbox for Business is not really what it states. On the website is says – see below – which is a completely misleading statement as far as I'm concerned.

''file saving and sharing tool for as little as £9.17/user/month.''

Silly me thinking that I could sign us both up to Dropbox for Business but then you get hit with the news that it has a minimum of 5 users and is £500 per year.

 

Is it me or did the website say £9.17 per user per month?

 

SO, with having to pay again for Retrospect and the outrageous misleading statement from Dropbox for Business we are beaten in to submission and won't be using either.

 

This is another kick in the teeth for small business... do these big companies not realise the SME market place and how many small businesses there are out here.

 

Rant over.

[Mayoff]

You do bring up some good points:

 

> Small business can't keep affording these upgrades.

 

This is why almost all new Retrospect products include 1 year of ASM (Annual Support) which includes unlimited technical support and free product upgrades for the term of the contract. You can then renew the ASM contact at the end of the year for less then the cost of a standard upgrade. It is similar to a subscription model, but the actual software will never expire.

 

You can view your upgrade options at http://www.retrospect.com/upgrade to see if you qualify for a free upgrade or not.

 

As far as Dropbox goes, Retrospect still supports backup to Disk, NAS and tape. Cloud backup is an option that the majority of Retrospect users have been requesting and we are offering more and more options for customers at different price points. To help understand the costs of other services (like Amazon S3), we have published a document about understanding the prices involved:

 

http://www.retrospect.com/en/support/kb/how_to_estimate_cloud_storage_costs

[andymac]

Hi Mayoff, and thank you for your reply.

 

I am a little confused by your comment ''You can then renew the ASM contact at the end of the year for less then the cost of a standard upgrade.'' The Upgrade I am offered is over $100 more for the ASM contract than the standard upgrade so I don't quite follow your reasoning.

 

I also looked on your link for the upgrade possibilities and I could have got the free upgrade that you offer for purchased in February but I purchased at the end of January. I know it has to start somewhere but I'm really miffed about force you are exerting to spend and then start adding subscriptions. All very disappointing really.

 

However, thanks for your reply. I guess I will just have to look for other products that aren't quite as 'nasty' to little people.

 

Have a good day.

[Lennart_T]

 I guess I will just have to look for other products that aren't quite as 'nasty' to little people.

 

 

You can run your Retrospect version as long as you like. It will never expire.

 

If you elected to NOT buy ASM, well that was YOUR choice. 

 

Upgrades are (almost) never free for any product.

 

If you buy another product than Retrospect, I would like to know which and why. 

[macpro]

http://www.retrospect.com/en/support/kb/how_to_estimate_cloud_storage_costs

 

Thanks for that link. It helps in trying to estimate what cloud backup could cost.

 

 

@andymac: Ever since Retrospect is on it's own feet again they have been delivering a big update every year. I've updated a couple of times and also skipped versions, but in the end I always had to pay a rather large amount for an update. This year I've bought my last update and added ASM. So next year I'll pay less and still remain up to date. 

The reason that I've switched to ASM is because of the frequent updates that Retrospect has been delivering. It looks like they will continu to do this in the future and that provides an update option at a better price.

[DavidHertzberg]

Since this is a thread about the cost of Retrospect cloud backup, and since Mayoff may read it, I'll take the liberty of making one post justifying a cost-saving suggestion I posted back in March 2016.  I have now made the suggestion official with a thread in Product Suggestions—Mac OS X, but IME nobody at Retrospect Inc. pays any attention to that forum.  However to avoid choppiness here I won't duplicate links to other threads that are in my linked-to post.

 

Trigger warning: Reading the next four paragraphs of this post will undoubtedly cause you to at least slap your forehead, when you consider that Retrospect Inc. ignored that suggestion in the Mac 13.5/Windows 11.5 update.

 

jethro started a thread on March 2nd—one day after Retrospect Mac 13.0 was released—saying "we'd love to augment our existing backup with maybe a weekly data transfer to a cloud storage as a backup of our onsite backup (we'd want our local HD backup to still be primary and work as-is).  .... The total space used for ALL backups (which goes back 4 years now) is about 5TB, spread across 4 hard drives. .... We might be fine transferring either just current data forward, or maybe everything back to a year or so ago ...."  I responded on March 8th with a post setting out a step-by-step procedure by which he could do that.  That thread has become wildly popular, which presumably means that many people want to do the same kind of cloud backup.  

 

My procedure assumed jethro would do "seeding" of his existing on-site backup data.  By the time WKTimes started a similar thread on September 7th, it had become obvious that "seeding" was now only available—directly or indirectly—from two cloud providers, and costs US$230 and up.  Therefore I rewrote the procedure assuming "seeding" would be replaced by a lengthy Internet upload to the cloud account.  WKTimes only wants to permanently maintain the last two weeks of backups in the cloud, but I told him Retrospect can't groom below a one-month minimum.

 

The key point is that the first two steps of both versions of my procedure are:

1) Create a new local Disk or Cloud-with-Disk-local-member Media Set [Disk for non-"seeding", Cloud-with-Disk-local-member for "seeding], specifying "Groom to Retrospect defined policy" with Months to keep = n [n = 12 for jethro, n = 1 for WKTimes].   Choose Performance-optimized grooming.  This would have to be as big as your regular backup Media Set.

2) Run a Copy Media Set script to copy your regular Media Set to the new local Disk Media Set, with the option Match Source Media Set to destination Media Set unchecked and the option Copy Backups checked.  You will have to Groom the new Media Set afterwards.

 

That means that jethro would have to buy a 6TB disk drive to be the destination of the Copy Media Set—even though he would immediately be doing grooming to cut the contents down to less than 1TB.  That would have cost him more than US$300 (it's now down to $200 as of September 15th).  WKTimes would also have to buy disk(s) equal in capacity to his regular backup, which "is 'very large' and partially off-site"—even though he would immediately be doing grooming to cut the contents down to the last four weeks.  

 

How about that excess expense for cloud backup?

[Mayoff]

For the record, andymac did qualify for a free upgrade and it has been sent to him.

[Mayoff]

>Product Suggestions—Mac OS X, but IME nobody at Retrospect Inc. pays any attention to that forum

 

This is not correct. The product feature request sections are reviewed regularly by product management and Retrospect engineering.

[DavidHertzberg]

>Product Suggestions—Mac OS X, but IME nobody at Retrospect Inc. pays any attention to that forum

 

This is not correct. The product feature request sections are reviewed regularly by product management and Retrospect engineering.

 

 

That would be a lot more believable if—as I have suggested here on 14 April 2016—someone in Retrospect Inc. product management or engineering replied to each feature request in one two sentences either "This good idea was/will be implemented" or "This was judged to not be a good idea" or "This was judged to be a good idea, but too much work to be implemented".  It would give the Retrospect Inc. reviewer something to do with his/her fingers while reviewing.

 

It's called "feedback to the customer".  You could take a Marketing course that discusses it.

[DavidHertzberg]

I'll make one more brief post to link to an alternative cost-saving product feature request, which as a result of testing I now consider worthy of seriously being made.  The justification is the same as paragraphs three through six of this post up-thread.

[DavidHertzberg]

Just wondered if anyone can help me justify the cost of the latest Retrospect upgrade to Mac13.

 

....

 

And then there is DROPBOX.

Retrospect has proudly announced that it is now a Dropbox Partner. As a Dropbox user I was keen to see how I can use the new set up. Basically I can't...

As a small business with just 2 Macs I would need to use Dropbox for Business. Dropbox for Business is not really what it states. On the website is says – see below – which is a completely misleading statement as far as I'm concerned.

''file saving and sharing tool for as little as £9.17/user/month.''

Silly me thinking that I could sign us both up to Dropbox for Business but then you get hit with the news that it has a minimum of 5 users and is £500 per year.

 

Is it me or did the website say £9.17 per user per month?

 

SO, with ...  the outrageous misleading statement from Dropbox for Business we are beaten in to submission and won't be using either.

 

....

 

....

 

 

I have a strong feeling that what the Dropbox website was referring to is a service other than Dropbox Business—namely Dropbox Pro as described in the second section of this page.  "Dropbox Pro is a paid subscription that includes 1 TB of space and additional features. You can choose to subscribe monthly or annually."  When I click the link at the bottom of that section, it takes me to a page that says I can update my free Dropbox account—which it knows about—to Dropbox Pro for US$9.99 per month or US$99 per year.  US$9.99 per month sounds like the equivalent of £9.17 per month, but I can't make that page switch to another account or country.

 

Since "seeding" is not available for Dropbox, andymac should read the fifth paragraph of this post, and then follow the link in that paragraph to find a procedure for cutting his presumed existing Retrospect backup down to 1TB or less.  There is a rewrite of that procedure into step-by-step in the next post in that linked-to thread. andymac will have to adapt steps 3) through 7) to whatever procedures Retrospect Inc. eventually puts into the Mac 13.5 User's Guide for using Dropbox instead of an AWS-S3-compatible cloud service.

 

BTW, andymac should be aware of a rather neat concept that underlies Retrospect for cloud services, which is that the only computer that communicates with the cloud is the Retrospect "backup server"—not the computers running the Retrospect Client software.  This is what I have termed the "second-level client" concept.  It means that—to "avoid any Imperial complications"—he should setup a separate Dropbox Pro account for cloud backup from his "backup server" computer, distinct from any free Dropbox account he may already be using between his machines.  

 

Good luck!