🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Jul26.083232.14547@grian.cps.altadena.ca.us>, alex@grian (Alex Pournelle) writes:
>P.S. Comments from Retrospect users are welcome; I don't have a copy to
>compare.  Besides, when I back up people's systems, F-B seems by far the
>more popular (not to say reliable) choice.  SUM Backup seems most
>reliable, but it won't back up by folder name.

I switched from FB to Retrospect and am very happy that I did.  I,
too, suffered from occasional crashes in FastBack (running under
Finder with no INITs, so INIT conflicts certainly weren't the
problem), both while backing up and restoring.  Crashing while
restoring was unsettling, to say the least...  :-(

Retrospect is a pleasure to use, and has the additional benefit of
allowing true archiving, not just backing up.  FB has no notion of
multiple archives; in fact, the program seems to be designed so that
there is no way of maintaining multiple archives for a single volume.

Retrospect is not without problems, though.  Its user interface for
selecting certain files but not others is certainly not intuitive,
though it can be learned.  And it handles file verification (reading
back the backup and comparing to the source) in a very safe, but time
consuming way for floppies, since in all cases it starts at the
beginning of the backup session and reads back each file in turn.
Makes sense for tapes, certainly, but not really for floppies.

Also, certain operations are a tad slow on a Plus, but acceptable.
Scanning an archive and matching files (to see which need to be backed
up) can take a while on a Plus if you have a large disk.  Window
updating is also a little sluggish on a Plus.

But it seems rock solid and very flexible, and works very nicely under
Multifinder.  I don't regret for a minute switching from FastBack.

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