EMC Retrospect 7.5 Professional for Windows
Retrospect Backup 7.5 offers complete protection for the used in small and midsize businesses. Your home and home office computers contain more and more personal, family, and financial data than ever -- what happens if you inadvertently delete a file, are attacked by a virus, or your computer fails? Don't lose your family photos or the only copy of your tax returns. Recover your information quickly to keep your home office running smoothly.
EMC Retrospect 7.5 Professional for Windows Accessories
 Emc Retrospect 7.5 Client 1PK Windows
QuickBooks Pro 2008 [OLD VERSION]
EMC Retrospect 7.5 Professional for Windows Upgrade
EMC Retrospect Express HD
Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000
SanDisk SDSDH-2048-901 2 GB Ultra II Secure Digital Memory Card ( US Retail Package )
Acronis True Image 11 Home [OLD VERSION]
D-Link DUB-H7 High Speed USB 2.0 7-Port Hub
Sandisk 4GB Cruzer Titanium USB Flash Drive with U3 (SDCZ7-4096-A10, Retail Package)
Fellowes Powershred Lubricant Cutter Oil for Confetti-Cut Shredders (35250)
EMC Retrospect 7.5 Professional for Windows Reviews
Each scheduled back up worked well, how ever I had to use windows scheduler to wake up the workstation from hibernate. One workstation in the house, a family laptop, and a work laptop. I really wanted to buy the Acronis package, since its image backup has saved my bacon in the past, but the normal everyday backup was really bad. The software is great. I'm using this product as a backup server for files on three PCs. No problem for me, but it might be tough for a novice user.
The interface took a few hours to learn, but it has everything you really need. I have tested the restore on many occasions and have found it to be reliable. I would not buy it if your intent is to restore a complete OS. I am not using it for a full hard drive/ OS recovery, just incremental backups of important files and user directories. I would not call it overly complex, but it may be a bit much for a home user. For the first few weeks I enabled the email feature to email me upon each backup, successful or not. The reason I purchased this software was that Acronis restore failed when I tested it.
In short, I would buy this product if you need to continuously backup your files on a regular basis.
Personally I use a combination of daily backups to an external HD and every week the most valuable data is written on DVD's to store in a safe place. Very good value for the money.
If you are looking for some simple one click backup solution, Retrospect is your thing. But if you are willing to dig in the extensive manual, and spend some time and effort to get to know your way in Retrospect, this may be very rewarding.
The amount of options is large. One can build all kinds of schedules, backup sets and so called selectors, save them, edit them later on, and knit everything together until it suits any need you can possibly have.
Certainly, it sports some wizards that lead you through the process of invoking solid, time scheduled, backups. The program has no problems with open files.
The program proved to be rock solid. I like the possibility to reach back in time to grab this erroneous overwritten or deleted file.
If you have more than 3 machines to back up consider Microsoft Home Server software with HP hardware. Great product at a great price. Alot less than Acronis products.
What's wrong with this software is the poor documentation, poor avenues for help, and the frankly quite awful EMC website. I've used Retrospect on and off for 10 years. I never found any clue of this in the help system or by searching EMC's site or the web. I have found Windows checkdisk and scandisk to be unable to detect real problems. 7.5 now supports Windows Vista and I'm using it to back-up 2 PCs to a SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS 500 Office Storage Server on my home network. I found out that hard drives in both my PCs were failing even though Windows utilities had no clue. So vague that you don't know if the error is because of the source drive (reading) or the destination drive (writing) of a file. A serious tip: when you see errors that files aren't backed-up, you likely have bad sectors on your hard drive - regardless of the reason or error code stated in the log file.
By downloading and running a low-level hard drive utility (SeaTools from Seagate for Seagate and Maxtor drives) you can find out if it is your hard drive for sure. Seagate has excellent free phone support as well. I haven't a clue, but now you know too. I already had to use it to recover an entire hard drive that crashed and it worked. Now that I have re-installed, I am forcing the index to be stored on my back-up server instead. None are really designed to help home users.
If you can get past that, the software is quite excellent. This really ought to be the default, but I suppose it wouldn't work right on a tape drive. I've been using 7 and 7.5 for about 4 months. Often the error codes given by Retrospect are too vague to be helpful. I did have to recreate the index when restoring since by default it was stored on the crashed hard drive. Since replacing both drives I have not had any problems or errors reported by Retrospect.
Why doesn't Retrospect suggest that impending hard drive failure might be the cause of back-up errors.
I am sure there will be a fair number of negative reviews but if you read between the lines most of them can be traced to inept users not willing to pay their dues and learn the intricate workings of this powerfull application. There are other alternatives much easier to use but they lack the power and configuration options that come with Retrospect. As a consultant that installs and maintains this product for many clients on both PC and Macintosh platforms I have watched the development and maturing of this excellent product into what I consider the best backup solution on the market.
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