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Retrospect 6.1 backup damaged files?


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My dad recently upgraded to Snow Leopard. Not knowing Retrospect 6.1 wasn't compatible with 10.6 (I didn't know either), he did a back up. There were hundreds of thousands of compare errors, all modification time mismatches. It appears Retrospect updated the last modification time of virtually every system file (but not those in the home directory). I assume this affected any compressed system file.

 

Yes, I realize (now) that 6.1 is officially incompatible with Snow Leopard. The question is what did Retrospect do to all of the files?

 

Did it just erroneously update the last modification time, or did the backup uncompress every file?

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Since Retrospect 6.1 has been stated to be incompatible with Snow Leopard and is not supported on Snow Leopard, I can't see how you can expect an answer from EMC support because such an answer would involve supporting Retrospect 6.1 on Snow Leopard, and the rest of us users in these user-to-user Retrospect support forums, not having access to the source code, wouldn't be able to answer either.

 

Russ

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If Retrospect 6.1 is stated to be incompatible with OS X 10.6, then it is reasonable to expect that Dantz knows why it is incompatible, and know what are the most obvious symptoms of said incompatibility. Given that knowledge, it is also reasonable to expect them to be willing to explain, if possible, damage to a user's system caused by that incompatibility. I haven't upgraded to 8.x yet either because of the tremendous number of bugs and usability issues I encountered when I tried it out. I also didn't realize it would damage my system - just dumb luck, and complacency due to Time Machine, that I didn't encounter it myself.

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If Retrospect 6.1 is stated to be incompatible with OS X 10.6, then it is reasonable to expect that Dantz knows why it is incompatible, and know what are the most obvious symptoms of said incompatibility.

Perhaps, but Dantz ceased to exist over five years ago. Here is the press release that announced the demise of Dantz when it was purchased by EMC:

EMC Acquries Dantz Development Corporation - October 12, 2004

 

I guess that you and I read the Snow Leopard Compatibility Statement differently:

 

Unsupported Configurations

 

The following Retrospect configurations are unsupported with Snow Leopard, and they will remain unsupported in the future.

  • EMC Retrospect 6.1 and earlier for Mac
  • EMC Retrospect 7.5 and earlier for Windows

To me, that says: we won't support Retrospect 6.1 and earlier for Mac running on Mac OS 10.6, we aren't going to waste the time figuring out what it breaks because the older code base can't be made to run on 10.6, and don't even try to use Retrospect 6.1 or older on 10.6. It's just broken.

 

Russ

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Yes, I've been aware since it happened that Dantz was acquired by EMC. Freudian slip. I've been using Retrospect for 20 years. It's still Dantz to me, and even the forums are still forums.dantz.com. Sorry for the misstatement.

 

You are right, I don't interpret "unsupported" to mean "totally broken". If a software product will damage your system by doing something that should be read-only, I expect that to be an explicitly stated warning. Perhaps they didn't know, but I find that hard to believe.

 

There are innumerable unsupported applications that aren't even close to totally broken, or not even broken at all. And, there are very, very few that will trash your system doing something that should be read-only.

 

But I don't want to get in to an argument over semantics. Going back to the original question, some additional research confirms that the last modification time was updated on every (HFS compressed) system file because Retrospect 6.1 caused them to be uncompressed when backing them up.

 

I don't even know how you do that accidentally. It normally takes an explicit request to do that, like running afscexpand.

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