EMC Retrospect 7.5 Professional for Windows

List Price: $129.00 Discount Price: $79.99

Features:

• Complete protection for Windows desktops and notebooks
• Secure, reliable protection for all your information
• Simple, yet powerful - start your first backup in minutes
• Fast backups and Smart Restores with unparalleled accuracy
• Automated Disaster Recovery

Customer Reviews:

Loyal user for years, just keeps getting better [Posted on 2007-11-07]
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.
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.

Retrospect Professional 7.5 works with Vista [Posted on 2007-11-11]
I've used Retrospect on and off for 10 years. I've been using 7 and 7.5 for about 4 months. 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 already had to use it to recover an entire hard drive that crashed and it worked. I did have to recreate the index when restoring since by default it was stored on the crashed hard drive. Now that I have re-installed, I am forcing the index to be stored on my back-up server instead. This really ought to be the default, but I suppose it wouldn't work right on a tape drive. What's wrong with this software is the poor documentation, poor avenues for help, and the frankly quite awful EMC website. None are really designed to help home users. If you can get past that, the software is quite excellent. 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. I never found any clue of this in the help system or by searching EMC's site or the web. Often the error codes given by Retrospect are too vague to be helpful. 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. 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. I have found Windows checkdisk and scandisk to be unable to detect real problems. Seagate has excellent free phone support as well. I found out that hard drives in both my PCs were failing even though Windows utilities had no clue. 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 haven't a clue, but now you know too.

emc retrospect 7.5 [Posted on 2007-12-08]
Great product at a great price. Alot less than Acronis products. If you have more than 3 machines to back up consider Microsoft Home Server software with HP hardware.

Something to trust your valuable data to [Posted on 2008-03-29]
If you are looking for some simple one click backup solution, Retrospect is your thing. Certainly, it sports some wizards that lead you through the process of invoking solid, time scheduled, backups. 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 program proved to be rock solid. The amount of options is large. I like the possibility to reach back in time to grab this erroneous overwritten or deleted file. The program has no problems with open files. 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. 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.

Product works , buy it if you care about your data [Posted on 2008-04-24]
I'm using this product as a backup server for files on three PCs. One workstation in the house, a family laptop, and a work laptop. I am not using it for a full hard drive/ OS recovery, just incremental backups of important files and user directories. The software is great. For the first few weeks I enabled the email feature to email me upon each backup, successful or not. Each scheduled back up worked well, how ever I had to use windows scheduler to wake up the workstation from hibernate. 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 would not call it overly complex, but it may be a bit much for a home user. I have tested the restore on many occasions and have found it to be reliable. The reason I purchased this software was that Acronis restore failed when I tested it. 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. In short, I would buy this product if you need to continuously backup your files on a regular basis. I would not buy it if your intent is to restore a complete OS.

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