Looking for more info on 6.1 and OSX 10.6

[jorman]

Hello all,

 

I am mostly new to retrospect as it is not fully in my area. But I have been given the project of researching it for various reasons. That being put out there...

 

I understand that Server 6.1 and Snow Leopard are not supported as a viable combination. And from what little I have found to read, even if it looks like it works on the server it may not actually be working. I will be looking into that very soon.

 

So I guess my question in all of this is: Has anyone been able to get these two to play nice? And if yes or no, what feedback or information can you pass forward?

 

From what I am told by the higher ups is that the backups work if the computer is freshly booted and never logged into or currently logged in by a user, but does not work if the user has logged out and left the computer at the log in screen.

 

Any feedback and/or advice would be appreciated. We are looking into the server 8, but with state budgets being what they are, I am not sure when that will actually happen.

 

Thanks for the help!

 

Jorman

[rhwalker]

Any feedback and/or advice would be appreciated. We are looking into the server 8, but with state budgets being what they are, I am not sure when that will actually happen.

My advice would be to go with Retrospect 8.2, once the big bugfix update arrives. If your data isn't worth the price of a Retrospect upgrade to support the current Mac OS, then your data isn't worth backing up. A backup strategy is part of the cost of doing business with computers.

 

I believe, if you look objectively at the cost of your time to investigate this and to deal with lost data and lost time spent dealing with unbootable computers, you would find that the Retrospect 8 upgrade makes business sense.

 

If you are insistent on running Retrospect 6.1, then stick with Macintosh 10.5.x and below.

 

Those are my suggestions.

 

Russ

[jorman]

Russ,

 

In working for a state agency I wish it was as cut and dry as the data is worth it or not, but that is not the case. Our data is very important, and needs the backups that we do. So hopefully that will come through sooner or later.

 

Thank you for your timely response. Is there any more information you or anyone can give as to what does or does not happen? Everything I seem to read on these forums is just a dry "Switch to 8" or "That is not supported", and I understand those answers, but my boss wants more information. Sigh. Any other pertinent information would be very appreciated!

 

Thanks again!

 

Jorman

[rhwalker]

In working for a state agency I wish it was as cut and dry as the data is worth it or not, but that is not the case. Our data is very important, and needs the backups that we do.

Jorman, you (or your management) may be overly constraining the problem such that there is no solution. You might as well wish for a pony.

 

If you stick to Retrospect 6.1,

 

(1) you have an unsupported product in an unsupported configuration.

 

(2) Retrospect 6.1 knows nothing about the substantial changes that were made for Snow Leopard, and so cannot backup (and correctly restore) an operational system.

 

(3) Retrospect 6.1, when run on an Intel architecture Macintosh, is a Carbon API program running under the Rosetta emulator. There are many, many known bugs and issues with Carbon on Rosetta, and Apple has refused to address them, perhaps to encourage developers to move their code to the Cocoa API. This has been well-discussed in these forums, and I won't repeat that discussion here, but, suffice it to say, it's a creaking house of cards. The Retrospect group did move on to a new code base, and has abandoned the Retrospect 6.1 code base.

 

I wouldn't trust my firm's data to Retrospect 6.1 running on Snow Leopard. We are waiting for a stable and functional Retrospect 8.x before upgrading our computers. We'd rather run slow and reliably than fast and lose data. It would be negligence, in my opinion, if I did what you are attempting to do.

 

To me, item (1) alone is enough reason to do the upgrade (providing that Retrospect 8 is stable enough for production use). My data is valuable. Apparently your state's data is not.

 

Right now, in my opinion, Retrospect 8 does not have the necessary level of stability for production use, but I am hopeful that the upcoming bugfix release will be at that level. The Retrospect group finally seems to be doing a release right, and I believe that they have put a great amount of effort into making this upcoming release worthy of trusting my data to it (after, of course, a rigorous shakeout using an isolated testbed, and testing for our configuration).

 

Russ