Mayoff Posted February 22, 2002 Report Share Posted February 22, 2002 Retrospect versions prior to 4.2 have expired. During launch, Retrospect 4.1 or earlier may display a "Your Macintosh clock/calendar appears to be wrong. Please confirm the date and time" dialog box. Please upgrade to the latest version of Retrospect to avoid this problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hughessc Posted March 1, 2002 Report Share Posted March 1, 2002 Why do versions of Retrospect prior to 4.2 expire? Do all versions of Retrospect have expiration dates? Are these expiration dates posted anywhere? -Scott Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted March 1, 2002 Author Report Share Posted March 1, 2002 Retrospect 4.1 was released way back in 1998, and is not compatible with Mac OS 9.x. To ensure OS 9 compatibility and backup reliability users should upgrade to 4.3 of Retrospect. Future releases of Retrospect should not expire for at least 20 years, so these expiration issues should go away with Retrospect 5.0 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hughessc Posted March 1, 2002 Report Share Posted March 1, 2002 Thank you for replying to my original post. We are a large school system (over 200 sites on our WAN, almost 40,00 Macintosh and PC computers) and we don’t have the resources to go out and upgrade all of our machines every year. We have found as a general rule if you can freeze a machine at a point in time (keep the same OS, AppleShare and applications) that they will work more reliably than trying to keep them up-to-date. We have a number of servers that work very reliably with older computers that won’t be upgraded for a couple more years. They are not running Mac OS 9. They will never run Mac OS 9. Is there any problem with not upgrading to version 4.3? Is there any way to make the annoying message go away without upgrading to version 4.3? -Scott Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted March 1, 2002 Author Report Share Posted March 1, 2002 Automated Backup Schedules will not display the alert. The only way to avoid the dialog, outside of a product upgrade, is to back date the date on the computer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul_bruneau Posted March 4, 2002 Report Share Posted March 4, 2002 I'm not sure I would call 1998 "way back". I am happy with much software from "way back" in 1998 including Office, Illustrator, Quark, and Photoshop. I happen to be running Retrospect 4.0 very happily on OS9.2 with no trouble ever, except for this time/date annoyance, and there is no actual feature-based reason that I would upgrade this fine product at this time. I wish to continue to use 4.0 for now and being provided with a patch for this problem would keep my high opinion of Dantz high. PB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidlee Posted March 7, 2002 Report Share Posted March 7, 2002 I am very disappointed that danzt has set retrospect to expire. I don't know if this was stated in the small print when we purchased it, if I had known/realized I would of tried hard to find an alternative software maker for backups. I think it is very misleading and it has now reduced my trust in this great product, I mean if it can get away with this what will it do next. For all we know next it will lock our catalogues before we upgrade. This seems to me to be a way of forcing people to depart with more money in upgrading, we don't need to upgrade. What is to be done about this? My questions are: Was we informed when the software was already purchased and if so was it in the small print or was it in the main marketing material? When did they put in the expiry date, was it when we updated with patches? Is there going to be a patch to fix this problem? Thanks David Lee Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricU Posted March 8, 2002 Report Share Posted March 8, 2002 Dantz never meant to leave this check in the application, and we see this as a real problem. We are investigating a fix now, and I apologize for any inconvenience this issue is causing. I'll post in the forums as soon as we have a solution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidlee Posted March 8, 2002 Report Share Posted March 8, 2002 thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hwolfe38 Posted March 11, 2002 Report Share Posted March 11, 2002 I’ve just read the back forums on this clock/calendar error message which I’ve just recently been experiencing, too. When will a patch be available to correct this problem. And will I still be able to use this application with this error message indefinitely? I do not plan on upgrading to 4.2 or higher. I am running Retrospect express on a Mac G3 running on OS8.6. I love this application, so please don’t tell me that it will not run any longer on my Mac in the near future. I never realized that this app had an expiration date attached to it forcing me to upgrade at some point and spending an additional sum of money. Thank you, Henri Wolfe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hughessc Posted March 12, 2002 Report Share Posted March 12, 2002 I too would like to thank you for looking in to this and am anxiously awaiting a patch or some other solution to the problem. Thanks, -Scott Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidjanes Posted April 4, 2002 Report Share Posted April 4, 2002 Glad to hear there will be a patch soon. It is getting very annoying to have to repeatedly do this throughout the day. Why on earth did they put in the expiry date in this product? If I was going to have to pay to upgrade I would rather switch to another program to avoid this issue in any future release! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted April 29, 2002 Author Report Share Posted April 29, 2002 Hello, Dantz now has an update that fixes the "Expiration" problem that results in the dialog box asking users to reset the clock during launch. The update can be found at: ftp://ftp.dantz.com/pub/updates/retro_clock_update.hqx This update should work for Retrospect 4.0 and 4.1 users. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavePinnell Posted April 30, 2002 Report Share Posted April 30, 2002 The link to this update appears not to be working. Clicking on the link produces the message: "Not Found. The requested URL //ftp.dantz.com/pub/updates/retro_clock_update.sit was not found on this server." Entering the address into my browser produces the message: "retro_clock_update.sit: No such file or directory." Can you tell me if there's any other way to get hold of this update? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IrenaS Posted April 30, 2002 Report Share Posted April 30, 2002 The URL has been changed. Mayoff's amended post contains the correct one: ftp://ftp.dantz.com/pub/updates/retro_clock_update.hqx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chance Posted July 17, 2002 Report Share Posted July 17, 2002 Ever since I applied this patch to both my server and test machine, the backup times have slowed incredibly. My test machine used to take 15 minutes to back up just under 1gig of data. It now takes 66 minutes. On my server, this patch has added 4-5 hours. I tried testing with 4.3 and I still see the same hideous backup times. Is there some other change I need to make? Both machines are happily running OS9.1 Many thanks..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted July 17, 2002 Report Share Posted July 17, 2002 The patch made no functional changes to the program beyond removing the expiration date. Backup speed is dictated by many factors, and is only as fast as the slowest component. If you are seeing a severe decrease in backup speed, start looking at the different variables involved in the backup and isolate them: CPU, Network, Backup Device CPU: Try running the same backup from another computer - do you see the same slow speeds? If so, you may be having network or device issues. If not, troubleshoot the original backup computer. Run disk diagnostics, disable unneeded extensions, run Drive Setup's 'Test' function. Network: Hook a client machine up to the server directly with a crossover cable. If the problem goes away, then you've got a bottleneck somewhere on your network. Backup Device: If you've ruled out the CPU and the Network, your drive may be having a problem. Standard SCSI troubleshooting includes the following troubleshooting: 1) a dirty tape drive. Clean the drive using a 4mm cleaning cartridge. Your drive manufacturer recommends that you clean the unit once for every 8-10 hours of run time. Once a week is more than enough for most people. 2) another device on your SCSI bus is interfering with the tape drive's communication. Turn off your Mac and the SCSI devices. Make sure your SCSI ID numbers don't conflict. Disconnect all SCSI devices except for the tape drive. 3) you have a bad cable. Replace the SCSI cable that connects the tape drive to the computer after removing other devices and cables from the SCSI chain. 4) you are missing a terminator or have a bad terminator. The last device and ONLY the last device in your SCSI chain needs to be terminated. Try replacing the terminator if you already have one on the chain. 5) the computer may be having a problem. Install Retrospect on another Macintosh and try the tape drive there as the only SCSI device. 6) the drive may be defective. If you have implemented all of the preceding steps and get failures on multiple tapes after changing cables, terminators and computers, then the drive, being the only factor that has not changed, is the culprit--send it back to your vendor for repairs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
larth Posted July 18, 2002 Report Share Posted July 18, 2002 Thanks for this fix! It is appreciated. --larth Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chance Posted July 19, 2002 Report Share Posted July 19, 2002 Thanks for your response. Applying this patch did cause problems to the backups that had nothing to do with the tape drive or network. After spending 2 days trying to find the conflict, I traced it down to Virex settings. On my test mac when I disable Virex Control Panel, the backup takes 15 minutes. When I enable it, it takes 49 minutes. I have tested this numerous times on my test mac. I found that when I turn off scan when open files and downloads, the backup time takes about 42 minutes. I've tried loading the control panel 1st or last and that still doesn't give me 15 minute backups. I'm backing up just under 1gig of data. On my server, I turned off scan when files open and downloads and already the times have dropped from over 3 hours to just 49 minutes. This is the time I was seeing before I applied the patch. On June 22nd the backup of the internal system disk took 49 minutes. On June 23rd I applied the patch and starting that night, the backups jumped to over 3 hours. Nothing was touched on the server since I started the backups immediately after installing the patch. No one had touched the server since the previous backup. I manually scan the server weekly so I'm not worried about leaving these 2 options turned off. I'm not even going to bother playing with the load options since this alone has fixed the length of my backup. The internal system disk seemed to take the brunt of this patch. I really didn't see much of a time difference on the other disks. This server contains 34gig of used data. Last night, after making the change, the backup on my server took 6.5 hours compared to 11+ hours the night before. Which is one of the better time since some nights it would take 12-13 hours. So you can see this change made a huge difference in my backup times. 6.5 hours is the same performance I was seeing before applying the patch. I am a happy camper! So there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this patch effected my 2 unrelated systems. I perform separate backups on these systems. Each one only backs up the disks that are connected to it, there's no remote backups. I just find it weird that I changed different settings in Virex on the 2 machines to get the results I needed in Retrospect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted July 20, 2002 Author Report Share Posted July 20, 2002 This patch makes no real code changes to Retrospect, all it does it remove the expiration date when launching the program. No system extensions or system files are changed by this patch. No backup drivers are changed with this patch. It just removes the date check. Also, remember that Retrospect 4.1 is a very old version of the software, and newer versions are 1) Compatible with newer operating system versions, 2) Improves performance for most operations. 3) Has a nice bootable CD for disaster recovery Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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