Finally Gave Up on Retrospect 8

[gskibum]

No doubt about that! I turned my back on tape for the rest of my life about 10 years ago! Been burned by it too many times.

 

Yet I know people who still use & trust tape.

[dskincaid]

 

We at MIT School of Architecture and Planning are ditching it as well... after 17 years. Despite Robin Mayoff's excellent contributions to these forums and a handful of other dedicated staff, enough is enough. If Retrospect were a baseball team (like the Chicago Cubs), then one might put up with this disgrace for another 5 years, but it isn't. This is purportedly enterprise class BACKUP software for cryingoutloud--arguably the most important software an admin runs.

 

What an unmitigated disaster Retrospect 8 has been. We've seen just about every problem documented in this forum since its release. (Restrospect 8 is running on a stock 2009 Xserve OS X 10.6.3, 12GB RAM with no other services enabled.) Engine crashing regularly, prefs not sticking, Proactive Backups not working, restores not working, bolloxed reporting, hosed Catalog files (just try turning on grooming AFTER the fact!), no manual for over a year, promised features missing (eg. client initiated restores), ghastly performance and on and on. To think we paid over $1000 for this, and hundreds of man-hours trying to make it work...

 

I'd rather root for those Cubbies for another 100 years.

 

Thank you Robin and thanks to those few who've given Retrospect their best, and may the devil take the rest.

 

dk

 

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cron | mit school of architecture and planning

[Mayoff]

no manual for over a year

 

Manual has been out for a few months now.

[cpguru21]

why turn your back on tape?

 

From recent reports of endevor between IBM and FujiFilm found here: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/IBM-FujiFilm-Set-New-Tape-Capacity-Record-494421/

 

"Tape storage is the most energy-efficient and cost-effective way to store digital data because when not used, tape storage systems require no energy. Businesses and governments use magnetic tape to store, protect and access vast amount of important data, including data and video archives, backup files, replicas for disaster recovery, and retention of information required for regulatory compliance."

 

I use Disk to Disk on my Mac servers with Retrospect.

 

On our more critical AIX server we use Tivoli backup to tape for rocksolid backup reliability.

 

Ideally when all is said and done, we will have our mac servers set up with a D-->D-->Tape scenario.

 

 

[dskincaid]

Yes, we got the manual the moment it was released--sorry for confusion. What I meant was 'No manual for a year after the release of Retrospect 8.'

[mrbiker]

Sorry, I've been really busy and haven't been able to post. However, I've been busy really starting to push Retrospect 8.2.

 

Hardware: Mac Pro 2 x 2ghz Dual-Core Xeons. 6 Gb RAM.

 

I had Retro 6.x running on an XServe G5 but I need the features of SL and all I had handy was a tower, so I installed on that.

 

2x500Gb mirrored RAID drives for OS. Two 2TB drives drives for storage. All 4 drives in the internal drive bays.

 

Snow Leopard Server 10.6.4 completely up to date. I started at 10.6.3.

 

I have about 1.5Tb of data to back up for a week of work for the whole office, and that allows 18 users and 4 servers to image their systems. I don't back up music, movies or photos, that's personal stuff and it eats up too much time and space.

 

I'm just going to back up to each 2Tb drive individually in rotation, then either dupe to an external 2Tb drive for offsite storage, or back it up to my VXA-2 Packetloader. Unfortunately, the VXA is getting long in the tooth (5 years old) so it's getting a bit flakey.

 

If anyone knows a solid tape drive they can recommend, or a better way to take backups off-site, please let me know.

 

I've gone another week and this hasn't crashed since install. I'm now building/modifying tasks while other tasks are executing and still no problems. Seems solid to me.

 

I've never read the manual and I've got about 90% of it figured out.

 

How much trouble can it be to give 8.2 a shot before you switch?

 

Like I said in my earlier post, it's really getting fun as it's fast to the point of not-bothersome and it's backing up data at around 1Gb/min consistently (on a new 1Gb network) and tonight it hit 1.8Gb/min backing up a laptop while I was modifying scripts.

 

 

cpguru21 - I'll report back when I do but it's going to have to wait until after the holiday (maybe even a week after that) as I'm on vacation and I've got some stuff that has to get done as soon as the 4th is over.

 

 

[eeolson]

How much trouble can it be to give 8.2 a shot before you switch?

Quite a bit of trouble if you have to wipe the prefs and start from scratch. I'm working for clients who have already paid to have it configured the first few times. Setting up 30 backup clients, defining volumes, tagging, scheduling, adding multiple servers, tape sets etc. etc.

 

Give me an 8.2 release that preserves settings, is stable and works as advertised, and I'm there. Like many here, I have 15 years of Retrospect experience that I'm not keen on leaving behind, but there's no excuse using backup software that isn't rock solid.

[Maser]

All my personal testing of the 8.2 betas had it preserve the 8.1 settings just fine. YMMV, of course...

[gskibum]

My settings were preserved too.

[gskibum]

The beta was worth it.

 

Performance when backing up the server went from 440 MB/minute to over 3GB/minute. Backing up the laptops went from 400MB/minute to about 650MB/minute.

 

Other bugs that bugged me are also gone.

 

I'm happy with Retrospect 8.

[eeolson]

Have any of you tried the beta version? It is much more stable then any other version. The final release will be out soon

 

That quote was from a month ago.

 

I just found that all my tagging is gone, so no backups. Funny thing is, I'm not at all surprised.

[swalker]

>I just found that all my tagging is gone, so no backups.

 

I found that most of my sources disappeared from one of my scripts again this week. Similar experience with tagging in the past. Most of 8.2 Retrospect seems solid, but the remaining bugs are annoying. Seems to me there is sloppy programming in a couple of areas that Roxio needs to weed out.

 

When I'm back from vacation, I'll re-install from scratch with fresh preferences if there's another beta out and we'll go from there.

 

8.2 Engine has crashed 15 times in a month, always weekday mornings. I set up a cron job to log & re-start the engine after a crash which has made the server fairly reliable:

 

#!/bin/sh

dat=`date`

result=`ps ax | grep "RetroEngine" | grep -v "grep"`

if [ "x" == "x$result" ]

then

/Library/Application\ Support/Retrospect/RetrospectEngine.bundle/Contents/MacOS/RetroEngine &

echo "dead $dat" >> /root/retro.log

else

echo "ok $dat" >> /root/retro.log

fi

exit

[fotmasta]

I sunk a lot of money into version 8 in good faith. I talked to the Retrospect reps at Macworld right before the release. Lots of promises, lots of waiting. I feel like I've been on a 3 year beta program. I'm thrilled to hear how good 8.2 is going to be.

 

Fortunately I found a press release that said we won't have to pay for a (finally) functional release.

 

fingers crossed

"hold on to your butts"

- SLJ ?

 

Edited July 27, 2010 by Guest

[Mayoff]

The download is available at:

 

 

http://kb.dantz.com/article.asp?article=9719&p=2

 

[samvenning]

I'm happy with Retrospect 8.2... very happy.

 

I was one of the biggest knockers of EMC and Retrospect 8.1. Slow network backup to Retrospect Client (Mac) was the biggest problem for us. I was extremely frustrated with the 18 month gap between Retrospect 8.1 and Retrospect 8.2. I gave Robin Mayoff and the development team some tough criticism. I feel users were really let down.

 

Retrospect 8.2 addresses the problems. I'm very, very happy with Retrospect 8.2: Fast, easy to use, great price and reliable. Thank you.