Retrospect Offers a New Perspective on Backups

Backing up your data is like flossing your teeth: You know it's a good idea, but chances are you don't do it nearly enough. It's not for lack of hardware--today's systems come with all sorts of backup options, including tape drives, CD-R/RW drives, and removable media drives like the Iomega Jaz and Zip. What's missing is quick, easy backup software.

Dantz Development attempts to fill this need with Retrospect, a backup program that works with all the hardware mentioned above. With a street price of $149 for the single-PC Desktop edition, Retrospect costs more than such competitors as Veritas Backup Exec. But it makes up for this by trying to simplify the process of restoring your entire hard drive after a total loss. Too bad this feature actually creates more work for the user.

When One Step Becomes Two

With most desktop backup programs, you create full backups once a week or so and "incremental" backups (just the changed files) in between. If disaster hits, you restore the last full backup and then the incrementals in between--a somewhat tedious process.

Retrospect is trying to change all that. It'll let you follow the old full/ incremental strategy--you can set up a basic backup regimen and specify times and days for automated backups. But when you need to fully recover your hard drive after a disaster, Retrospect's Snapshot feature automatically integrates full and incremental backups into a "one-step" restore. Unfortunately, that full restore process isn't as simple as the company claims.

Tested on a Pentium II-333 system using a 2GB Jaz drive as the backup medium, Retrospect ran its backup operation without incident, taking about 8 minutes to back up 892MB of data with compression, and another 8 minutes to verify the backup (by rereading the original files and comparing them with the stored ones). But when we reformatted our hard drive and launched a restore, we had to install Windows 98 into a temp directory, and then had to reinstall Retrospect. Most stand-alone PC backup programs let you circumvent the reinstall stage by creating "emergency" floppies that can be used to restore your PC to its predisaster state. This solution isn't perfect, either, but it gets you up and running faster and easier. Dantz says it is considering implementing a floppy-based restore in future versions.

Retrospect is a powerful backup program, and the Snapshot feature is a good idea. But the lack of a floppy-based restore will be a hassle for most desktop users, and the high price is not justified. Users looking for a comprehensive, no-hassle backup solution for a single desktop should try Backup Exec instead.