Retrospect Engine & Console on Apple Silicon

[j.a.duke]

Is anyone running their engine on Apple Silicon?

Are you seeing any issues?

 I've got a "spare" M1 Studio on which I can run the engine but wanted to see if the consensus is if it would be better than an 2018 i5 mini.

I'm hoping to see a native version of the engine & client soon.  One less translated app.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Jon

[Mayoff]

Fully supported on Silicon. Should be no issue.

[j.a.duke]

Robin,

Will I see any improvement in performance or will the network still be the limiting factor? Some systems on the local network take several hours to scan. 98% of the systems have SSDs.  I realize there's lots more files in the current macOS to deal with, but even with a selector of just the home folders (/Users), I'm not seeing quick executions.

As you might recall, I remember minutes per client for scan & backup, especially with v6, classic Mac OS (9.x) and slow networks (10 megabit or even 230 kbps). So hours seems excessive and I'm hoping that faster interfaces (TB3 & 4) and processors will improve performance significantly.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Jon

[MikeHutch]

Well there's your problem, 10Mbit network. That is slow. You need a minimum of 100Mbit or more.

I'd check your network switch box or router, is probably set at 10Mbit - which is likely the bottleneck of your network. If it is, you need to replace it with a faster unit.

BTW, it doesn't matter if your oldest computer has a slower network speed, as the extra bandwidth (100 or 1000Mbit) caters for all speeds.

[j.a.duke]

@MikeHutch

Back 20 years ago, it was 10 Mbit using version 6.  And backup times were short. 

Now I'm running 10Gbit to the Engine and 1 Gbit or better on clients and the time is significantly longer with current high-speed storage and fast networks.  Which seems to be going the wrong way, performance-wise.

In fact, the clients I'm backing up over the Internet (at best a 200Mbit connection) seem to run faster.  

In particular, my personal laptop takes 3-4 hours typically.  Running a local backup via Carbon Copy Cloner takes around 20 minutes max.  While I don't expect Retrospect 19 over a local network connection to match a Thunderbolt 3 SSD, I would not expect it to take 12 times longer.

And, with the significant speed improvement that Apple Silicon brings to the table, I would hope to see native software to bring similar performance improvements. But the components are still Intel-only code.

[MikeHutch]

Thanks for the update.

Sorry I think I got the wrong end of the stick there. However, yeh, that is strange being so slow.

Seems to be some kind of bottleneck going on with your backup, somewhere. Of course it all depends on how much data is being backed up. For instance my backup is usually around 1-6GB, which takes about 5-10min, backing up my internal SSD to a NAS over 100Gbit network.