Adam Engst
Adam C. Engst is the publisher of TidBITS. He has written numerous books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series, and many magazine articles thanks to Contributing Editor positions at MacUser, MacWEEK, and now Macworld. His innovations include the creation of the first advertising program to support an Internet publication in 1992, the first flat-rate accounts for graphical Internet access in 1993, and the Take Control electronic book series now owned and operated by alt concepts. His awards include the MDJ Power 25 ranking as the most influential person in the Macintosh industry outside of Apple every year since 2000, inclusion on the MacTech 25 list of influential people in the Macintosh technical community, and being named one of MacDirectory's top ten visionaries. And yes, he has been turned into an action figure.
For some time after I coordinated the NewROMs petition there was no response at all. Henry Norr of MacWEEK said that he thought the issue was dead until Apple issued a statement, and the only other mention that our letter received came from Bob Cringely of InfoWorld
In this day of limited resources, I especially enjoy hacking together strange combinations of equipment to cover for an expensive solution. Back when I worked for Cornell as a student supervisor, we had a real problem with backups
Retrospect 1.3
Dantz Development
1400 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 1
Berkeley, CA 94709
415/849-0293
415/849-0372 (tech support)
Rating:
9 Penguins out of a possible 10
Summary: -- Retrospect is possibly the most powerful backup and archiving program available for the Mac
One word on Retrospect 1.3 - powerful. My impression of Retrospect after using it for a while is that it can handle anything you throw at it terms of backup conditions
Retrospect is a hard program to pin down when it comes to usage. On the one hand, it has a myriad of features designed to make your life easier in the long run, but which can be a tad confusing right off the bat
True archiving keeps all the various versions of a file accessible at all times so that you can always go back and retrieve the file you want in the state that it was in on Wednesday, even if you've archived twice more since then
You should be starting to get an idea of Retrospect's power by now. The next few items make up the core of Retrospect's power. The most powerful feature Retrospect has, in my opinion, is the ability to create custom Selectors
There are a bunch of features that I haven't mentioned yet that many people will find extremely helpful. I don't much use them, but that doesn't imply that they aren't good
One of the wonderful things about networks is that they allow a lot of people to create a lot of information and share it with everyone else. One of the bad things about networks is that with so much information on the network, it often becomes almost impossible to back it all up in a coherent fashion
The manual that comes with Retrospect is quite well done, and offers in-depth discussions of all of the features provided. The manual works through each main process (backup, archive, restore, and retrieve) so that you can be up and running with basic usage quickly
Retrospect is not perfect, although Dantz did a good job of making the program extremely stable. One weak spot is the Retro.Prep file that Retrospect creates in your System Folder to keep track of scripts and selections and the like
As far as the company goes, most of the news is highly positive. I and all other registered users received version 1.3 free without asking for it before System 7 was released
Stephan Bublava writes, "I think I have found the hidden feature of HyperCard 2.1 (regarding report printing): Just choose "Print Report..." from the File menu with the option key down
Yay! I finally upgraded to System 7 golden a few days ago. I'd been messing around with one of the beta versions for a while, but that ended when I destroyed my hard disk briefly trying to recover some space from a partition using a version of Silverlining that didn't support System 7 disks
Videoconferencing is one of those nice ideas that has never much caught on because it's so pricey. However, with the terrorist scare during the Gulf unpleasantness, lots of executive types suddenly didn't feel too much like flying, evidently placing a fairly high price on their lives since they turned to videoconferencing in droves