Friday, July 30, 2010

Retrospect 8 - now at Roxio with a user guide

When Dantz owned Retrospect it was a quirky but reliable SOHO to enterprise cross-platform backup product with a vigorous and demanding customer base. I used the Mac and Windows versions for years.

When the Mac was dying (pre- OS X) Retrospect floundered. No surprise. It was sold to EMC where the Mac version was ignored and the Windows version was improved. EMC tried to do a new version, but it was very buggy. Happily they were never able to produce a user guide even a year or so after release.

I say happily, because the lack of a user guide was a perfect market of product failure. Only the young would buy a backup product without documentation.

Now Roxio owns Retrospect. They've done a new version. The dantz.com user forums are back and there's Product Documentation. It's not yet sold on Amazon however.

It's hard to believe Retrospect can be resurrected after such a rough ride, but I'm interested. I'll give it a few months but if it survives I'll test it out. I'd love to have something complementary to Time Machine -- I just don't trust that sucker.

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

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