Vendor's Description
Your home and home office computers contain more and more personal, family, and financial data. But what happens if you inadvertently delete a file, are attacked by a virus, or your computer fails? Will you lose your family photos or the only copy of your tax returns? Can you recover your information quickly to keep your home office running smoothly? That's why EMC Dantz designed Retrospect backup and recovery software - to make it easy to protect your data and computer systems.

Features

• Set up and run in ten minutes
• Complete protection for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux desktops and notebooks
• Fast backups
• Smart restores with unparalleled accuracy
• Full Disaster Recovery

Overview
Dantz makes an extensive line of Backup software. Retrospect Professional for PCs reviewed here is for a single machine and/or machines connected to that machine. There is a great deal of information available in a large printed manual (repeated on the CD), in other files on the CD or on the Dantz web site. 

The software is easy to load and for straight forward backup you do not need a lot of reference material.   

Requirements

• Windows XP
• Windows 2000 Professional
• Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
• Windows 98/ME
• 800 MHz Pentium 
• 128 MB RAM
• Hard disk with 200 MB free space for Retrospect Professional.
• A back up device ó Tape, hard disk or removable disk

Setup
The setup is very straight forward. Insert the CD and a window pops up with a menu. It offers the various manuals and an "Install" button. Selecting install resulted with a simple installation. 

In Use
After running Retrospect, it gives you a two level menu that leads to a simple menu with options to backup, restore, create CD, etc.. There are no requests for Product numbers, insertion of install CD or other distractions. One of the options is an immediate backup or an automatic backup. I am sure that there are lots of other features that will surface with time, but it is possible to do the minimum job for one machine in a very straight forward manner.

The 352 page manual on the CD and/or printed, covers all versions of Retrospect. It is best to use it as a reference after you have loaded the software. The software is easy to load and for straight forward backup, you do not need a lot of reference material. There is a lot of material available on the CD and on line. 

Retrospect will backup to almost any desired storage device. I tried it on a second hard drive, on a USB connected external hard drive, and on a USB flash memory. The only problem I had with the USB Flash was that it was too small and Retrospect ask for another drive to continue. It will concatenate multiple drives or CDs. I installed a second drive in the PC for the test using XP pro and it worked as advertised. I did not try restoring on that machine since it is a production machine. 

Retrospect will allow you to generate a Disaster Recovery CD. This proceeded very well until they demanded the Windows XP pro product number and the Windows XP disk. This is typical in the Windows world. I have several different copies of XP around and I could not get a product number and a disk to match up. I hope to have a new PC soon and I will continue the experiment. It seems like a very good idea. The problem is not with Retrospect, but with Windows and my poor filing system. 

Retrospect in the freestanding version offers the choice of compressing the data or not. The compression gives a good two to one reduction in file size, but it takes about 2 hours for the first backup. Once the first backup is complete, Retrospect will do a selective back up storing just the changes from the last backup. This takes about 8 minutes for the relatively small files on my machines (in the order of 10 GB). Retrospect offers a wide selection of choices as to just how much of the drive to backup. I elected to backup the entire drive, including software.

After I backed up the Windows ME machine, I erased a few files I did not need and generated a new test file so that I could do a backup and have a way to tell if it worked. Then I backed up the machine. To make a very long story short, Dell writes an odd hidden file that Retrospect does not backup. Retrospect has a paper on this with a work around. I did not find it until I had wasted quite a bit of time trying to solve the problem. This isnít the sort of problem I would expect with a Mac. If you are going to use Retrospect with a Dell, do the work around first. 

Summary
I think that Retrospect is a good program with a wide selection of features, not the least of which is the ability to work with both PCs and Macs. If you are mixing machines beware of mixing machines with different file types. The manual speaks to this but I did not have time to set up a test with differing machines. That is still to be done. 


Pros

• Good HMI
• Lots of information available. Itís all there somewhere. The paper with the Western Digital version is much better. It gives you a subset of the full manual. I assume that other backup hardware may have this version of Retrospect. 

Cons

• The Windows product number and installation disk are required to make a Rescue Disk. 
• The full manual is hard to wade through. Too much on servers and other unrelated subjects. There are some very good tutorials on things that you donít need to know. 

Overall Rating

4 out of 5 Mice