My hard drive volumes were trashed beyond repair while installing another product, so I inserted the RE CD to restore my disk. Unfortunately, everytime the boot-up gets about 90% done, I get a System error message and the whole thing locks up.

Now I have a crashed computer, a complete backup of my files on an external Firewire, and a completely useless CD with Retrospect Express printed on it.

Incidentally, the 2 other applications that I bought to help me during these events also didn't work. It's quite a beautiful thing.


Frustrating   August 12, 2003
 4 out of 5 found this review helpful

I bought this a year ago to back up my home Mac. Here's my primary complaints :

1. It's "compression" often makes files larger than the original, especially with compressed file formats (mp3s, jpegs, etc). You can turn off compression for a whole backup set, but not for individual directories.
2. It is not easy to use to back up portions of your system. I have 180 GB of hard drive space, but much of that is scratch space for digital work that I don't want backed up (iMovie directories are especially huge). So I only select individual directories to backup. Retrospect is not very helpful at sorting out these directories while Apple's Backup does some work for you (just check a box for Address Book, and Backup gets the right files).
3. I use a standard Pioneer DVR-104 Superdrive. Of a catalog of 14 CD-R's, Retrospect makes 6 coasters. Thats an almost 50% failure rate. With these exact same disks burned from the Finder, I have burned 100+ CD-R with zero failures. Retrospect's drivers are horrible.
4. Catalog failures. I get them all the time. And they never repair themselves. Start from scratch with a new backup set.
5. Cost! I figured Retrospect was a bargain at first: Apple's Backup would be [$$$], and I needed none of the other services from .Mac. But Retrospect has already released a tiny point upgrade to 5.1 that would cost me an upgrade fee. Nope, sorry, that was the last straw.

I switched to Apple's Backup recently and have been much happier. It does not do incremental backups like Retrospect, but who cares, at least it works. I can get most of my important stuff on a single DVD-R with Backup, so its not that big of a deal.


Too bad it is the only game in town   June 11, 2003
 8 out of 10 found this review helpful

I have about 15 years experience programming for the PC and the Mac. I bought this product basically because there did not seem to be much else on the market. I would describe it as odd, and somewhat useless.

I tried to back up 10 gb of data from my Powerbook hard drive to a firewire external disk. After some odd displays of counting over 100,000 files on my hard drive (there are actually less than 8,000) it announced that it could not deal with over 2 gb of data. That might have been ok in 1993, but not now.

Then I tried the duplicate function. Again it counts zillions of non-existent files, then runs for 12 hours, then announces that it quits for unknown reasons after doing about 3 gb of data. I have tried this 6 times now and no joy.

So I have had this product about a month and it has yet to be able to backup 10 gb of data.

Two other comments: first, the prompts and messages seem to be written by someone for whom english is a very second or third language, and by someone who is utterly unfamiliar with the Apple style book. Second, as far as I can tell, it has no smart backup feature, where you can ask it to back up just files that have been touched since the last back up.

All in all, I recommend that you pass on this product and write your own back up script.


I hate it!   April 21, 2003
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

I'm an experience Macintosh user, and have used an earlier full version of Retrospect at work to back up 40 Macs on our network. I bought Retrospect Express 5.0 to back up my iMac at home. First there were problems installing this software, then it fought me every step of the way with its inscrutible instructions, long wait times, and failures. I give up. Don't buy this junk. I just wasted $...!