Retrospect 6.0 Desktop Mac Description:

Retrospect 6.0 Desktop Mac review:
1 stars (Shameful Marketing, Manual Writing and Software Design) - Over the past two months I've tried to get this software to create two sets of incremental backups of a Mac on two USB2 hard disks. Despite more than 20 years experience with computers, and a successful installation of Norton Ghost 9.0 backup software on a PC, I have not been able to get dantz Retrospect Backup 6.0 Desktop Macintosh to work on my system. I'm sure that a dantz(TM) engineer could sit down in front of the Mac, execute a dozen or so commands and get it to work properly, but that would not in any way prove that Retrospect Backup 6.0 is an acceptable product. The problem of this, and many other software packages, is that there are a huge number of combinations of optional settings that don't work, so if the errors are intermittant, it can take years to debug without proper guidance from the designers. The Retrospect Backup 6.0 backup manual is at least six times thicker than the manual that came with first MacIntosh computers. Its content usefulness is next to zero. The same can be said for the usefulness of the online help menus. The consumer expectation for a desktop backup solution is a single button guiding you through menus and getting the setup done and verified in five minutes. With so much easy-to-use and intuitive Mac and PC software available today, it is next to criminal for the dantz(TM) marketing materials to claim ease of use, especially software written for Mac, where the ease-of-use standard is very high. I recommend that people never buy any dantz(TM) software product. If the CEO feels otherwise, I'd like to hear his/her case and I may reconsider. When they call I will only charge two dollars per minute.
2 stars (Unpleasant to use) - Nobody would give the authors of this software an ease-of-use award. From the outset it behaves as if it were written to please IT specialists and others whose careers depend on things being complicated and incomprehensible to mortals. Even when Retrospect is being directed to do something simple, it is not simple to do because it speaks some alien jargon. It could really serve as a model for bad interface design.



It isn't much discussed, but the Mac is really lacking quality tools for backup, file synchronization, and similar critical tasks.
5 stars (Best there is!) - Why the low ratings? I have used this for back-ups for years and it's just flat out the best there is for back-up. Do these "other users" really back-up? It's really simple and does it all.