What is Retrospect 5.0?

The important files on your Mac are like the teeth in your head: If you ignore them long enough, they’ll go away — and you’ll miss them. Software corruption, mechanical failure, and human error can strike and destroy data at any time. Worse, a fire, a natural disaster, or an act of dog could damage your Mac, or you could lose it to theft.

Retrospect comes in three forms; the basic Retrospect Express Backup package backs up data to another hard drive, removable media (such as Jaz or Zip drives), or qualified optical drives (including Apple’s SuperDrive and most modem CD burners...). Retrospect Desktop Backup adds the ability to back up to tape drives and is upgradeable to the network version — Retrospect Workgroup Backup, which includes client licenses for up to 20 computers.

Whether you use Mac OS 9 or OS X, installing Retrospect and setting it up is surprisingly simple. Just run the installer, launch the application, and select your backup options in the setup windows; you can set Retrospect to back up all your files or just the ones that have changed since your last backup. And lest you forget to flip the switch and start your daily backup, you can schedule Retrospect to run automatically.

In a long round of tests, we let Retrospect strut its stuff with both a regular hard drive and a tape drive. In every case, it performed backups reasonably fast, and we restored files — even a whole hard drive — without any difficulty.

If you already have Retrospect 4, though, the most compelling reason to upgrade is for the Mac OS X support. Version 5 adds support for Apple’s next-generation operating system, files larger than 2GB, larger numbers of files, and some new backup devices. That's about it.

All in all, Retrospect is a class act. If your Mac contains files you can’t afford to lose, you need Retrospect.

Steinberg, Gene. (August 2002). Retrospect 5.0. MacAddict. (pg. 50).

Download Retrospect 5.0 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver