"Support End-of-Life Announcement for Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5"

[DavidHertzberg]

That's the title of this Knowledge Base article posted 26 March, and it means what the title says.  I'm not worthy to re-phrase the writing of the august Documentation Committee, so I won't try—since you're all capable of reading the article yourselves.

This additional "spring surprise" (see this post for the other one) hits me personally, because I now back up 3 drives on a Digital Audio G4—which I intend to use to generate test data for a long-delayed personal programming project—once a week with Retrospect Mac 14.6.  Since emulation on my Mac Pro "backup server" seems unlikely to work, I have two choices to get around the problem once I've upgraded beyond the Retrospect Mac 15 "production build that continues to include support for those [old versions of OS X]."

[1]  I could keep an older version of Retrospect on my "backup server", and use that to backup the G4.  Presumably I'd have to buy separate portable USB drives for the new Media Sets.

[2] I could run Retrospect Mac 6.1 on the G4, and use that to backup to DAT tapes.  I actually have the hardware and software available to do that, since I used it to run a feasibility test before I installed a modern version of Retrospect on my Mac Pro.

I'm not the only non-antiquary dealing with backups of a PowerPC Mac; so is Chunky Gilmore per this post.

Thoughts? Moans?

[DavidHertzberg]

For choice [1] above, maybe I wouldn't have to buy separate portable USB drives for new Media Sets to backup the G4's drives.  Maybe, so long as I ensured that I didn't run the current and the old version of Retrospect on my "backup server" at the same time, I could have the old version run scripts that would backup to the same Media Sets as the new version.  That would be easy to ensure for no additional cost, because—when I replaced the HDD from which I was booting Retrospect with an SSD a few months ago—I kept the old HDD mounted as a third drive in my Mac Pro "cheesegrater" tower.  I could merely reboot from the old HDD whenever I wanted to backup the G4's drives.

This assumes that the format of Retrospect Catalog Files and Media Sets doesn't change from version to version, at least for a few years.  I'm pretty sure the format of Media Sets doesn't change, because Retrospect has its own proprietary format (which is why you can't use LTFS for Backup and Archive scripts).  I also don't think the format of Catalog Files changed after Retrospect Mac 8.

Any thoughts?

[DavidHertzberg]

On the other hand, for choice [1] in the OP maybe a more robust answer would be to have  different Media Sets for the G4, but have their Members on the same drives as the Members for my existing Media Sets.  Thus on G-DRIVE White, within the Retrospect folder I would have two folders, one named Media Set White (the existing one) and another named Media Set G4White (the new one).  Folder Media Set White would have the file 1-Media Set White within it, and folder Media Set G4White would have the file 1-Media Set G4White within it.

The sentence in parentheses in the first paragraph here shows that, as I thought I remembered, I can do this with Retrospect Mac 14.

Any thoughts?

[Monafly]

I've been doing this for years, as they dropped support for older Win systems (2000 or NT) quite some time ago. Still running RS 6 to back those legacy machine up, using the same media as the RS 15 backups that are catching everything else.