Using 6.5 client on peer-peer network

[fkesling]

I have 2 desktops & a laptop on a wired network. All machines run XP Home. One desktop has a firewire Maxtor external drive. The other has a USB Maxtor external drive. Until now I had retrospect 5.6 on both machines and was doing an unattended normal backup from each machine to it's own external drive. I don't keep any "valuable" data on the laptop. Anything there needing backup is copied to one of the other machines.

 

I upgraded from "Express" to "Professional"(6.5) on the machine with the USB drive. It runs fine doing a normal backup to its own external drive. Obviously I can keep on keepin' on and have reasonable backup (no offsite).

 

Looking through documentation it appears 6.5 can do backups from either machine to the external drive on the other machine over the network. This raises several questions.

 

1. To install 6.5 Client on the machine still using "Express"(5.6) do I have to first uninstall the old 5.65 version?

 

2. If I do #1, I don't think I can backup that machine to it's own external drive. True?

 

3. Is there any advantage (or disadvantage) to using the 6.5 network capability instead of just continuing to back up each machine to its own drive.

[natew]

Hi

 

Retrospect client and the Retrospect application work just fine together on the same machine so you won't have any conflicts there.

 

You could actually backup that machine to its own external drive but you are going to use a lot of network bandwidth so the backups will take longer.

 

Using the client is great if you have both of your backup drives on one machine and you want to backup all of the computers from there. In other words, use that one machine as a backup server for your network. Since you have your backup drives in 2 places it makes sense to continue doing things the way you have been. It will be faster too

 

Nate

[fkesling]

Thanks Nate.