Retrospect 17
StorCentric has issued Retrospect 17, a major new release for the Mac backup and recovery software. (StorCentric, the parent company of Drobo and Nexsan, acquired Retrospect, Inc. in June 2019 with plans to keep it as an independent, wholly-owned subsidiary.) The update enhances Retrospect’s Management Console with improved dashboard status displays for backup engines and automatic onboarding for Retrospect Backup engines, optimizes the ProactiveAI scheduling engine to handle more sources with different storage profiles and improve speed by up to 10 times, resolves an issue with backing up to a storage group that is being rebuilt, improves Dropbox performance, and fixes a timezone/Daylight Saving Time bug related to logging.
Retrospect 17 is free for customers with current annual support and maintenance contracts, and the company also offers a variety of pricing options for new and upgrade purchases. To protect a single non-server computer and its external hard drives, Retrospect Solo costs $49 as a one-time purchase ($29 upgrade from a previous license) or $3.99 per month ($39.99 annually) for the subscription edition. For backup of one non-server Mac and up to five additional Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, Retrospect Desktop costs $119 ($69 for upgrades) or $9.99 monthly ($99 annually). Both the Solo and Desktop editions offer Premium options that add the Management Console (Solo and Desktop) or phone support (Solo). A free, fully functional 45-day trial version is available. ($49 for Retrospect Solo and $119 for Retrospect Desktop new, upgrade pricing available, 195 MB, release notes, macOS 10.8.5+)
What does Retrospect mean when they specify a “non-server computer”?
I’m not sure it has that much meaning in the Mac world, now that I look.
Back when I was still using Retrospect, they meant any Mac running Mac OS X Server. When Server became an app store app, they checked for its presence.
Which is why I stopped using Retrospect. They decided that the presence of a $20 app was sufficient to force me into a massively overpriced installation, even though I was only going to be backing up one computer.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re still playing stupid games like this.
Was that when they were part of Dell EMC?
I used Diskfit but never had the need for Retospect when it came out from Dantz.
I’m pretty sure it was as a part of EMC. I bought my first license in order to back up to a FireWire tape drive from a PowerMac running non-server editions of Mac OS X (10.2 through 10.5). When my data got too big for two 33 GB VXA tapes, I switched to using hard drives for my backups, but kept on using Retrospect.
When replaced that Mac with a mini (running 10.7), I decided to purchase Server because it was cheap and easier than manually hacking/enabling the various server features I use (web, FTP, remote login, screen sharing, DNS, DHCP), I found that Retrospect would refuse to run. It saw the presence of Server.app and told me I needed a license for the server edition - which cost over $500, compared with the Desktop edition which was under $150.
At that point, I started making my backups with Carbon Copy Cloner and haven’t looked back. CCC is no good for things like making archival backups onto optical media, because it’s a disk-clone utility, not a backup utility, but it’s good enough for what I need most often.
I always liked Retrospect, but their brain-dead licensing policies have permanently changed my opinion regarding doing business with them. Still, I might consider using them when I get my next Mac, since Apple has stripped so many features out of Server.app that there’s no longer any reason to use it with current macOS releases. Without Server, I expect I will be able to use Retrospect Desktop even if I manually install Apache and turn on file sharing.