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 - Warning!! No tech support for this product!When it works, it works great, but... I've been successfully performing nightly automated backups of my C: D: and E: internal drives to my larger (750GB) F: internal drive... using EMC/Insignia/Dantz's Retrospect Express HD 2.0 purchased from Smith-Micro/Allume. Once a week I backup the F: internal drive to an external 750GB eSATA II drive using Memeo. All has been fine now since July (when Norton Ghost 10 hosed my C: drive so badly I couldn't boot without a reformat and re-install of XP Pro SP2). I have more than 800 good restore points on my destination drive. Two weeks ago, Retrospect Express started generating an internal code error message every night while backing up my C: drive. I searched the EMC/Insignia/Dantz knowledge base, but the error is undocumented. No hints in the users forum. Unfortunately, it seems EMC/Insignia/Dantz doesn't provide online tech support for this consumer product. I spent hours looking for a tech support question submission page, but instead found a circular link-to-link dead-end on the EMC/Insignia/Dantz web site. This lack of online tech support for this product was confirmed by what appears to be an EMC employee posting on the forum. You can purchase a commercial annual maintenance license, or pay $69.95 per incident for tech support, which is almost double what I paid for the original application. Although responsive, as the reseller, Smith-Micro/Allume's tech support is only capable of providing retail sales support or replacement of a defective install-CD. Lesson learned: I need to do a LOT more research into an app's maker before purchasing, to figure out whether after-the-sale tech support is available and reasonably priced. To its credit, during the period this app worked, it did everything promised: it saved me from my own stupidity several times (restoring individual files my fumble-fingers accidentally deleted). It also helped me reconstruct my entire hard drives' PC environ when my mobo toasted itself and I had to replace the mobo/cpu/DDR2 and re-install XP Pro SP2. It appears EMC/Insignia/Dantz's main business is commercial backup/restore, and that's their focus. They've just created this stripped-down, simpler GUI version to then sell off to resellers like Smith-Micro/Allume to sell to consumers. Buyer beware,... although, your mileage may vary. :) Rating:  - EMC RetrospectI don't understand all the negative reviews. This software won several awards from respected computer magazines. For me, it installed easily when following the documentation and it seems to be backing up the files and directories I selected. It's been running on my PC since April, 2007. I just purchased and installed a network storage drive so I will be moving the backups to that drive. Rating: - Are we talking about the same software?I have this software installed on a PC at home and it works great! Easy to install, runs like clockwork. I have used it to restore and it works every time. I backup about 25GB of my 80GB hard drive Contrary to what others say it IS possible to pick and choose only certain folders on a hard drive that you want to backup. When you set it up you can choose 1) Backup my entire computer, 2) Let me choose specific files, folders, and drives, 3)Let me choose files by type. I can't comment on support (or lack thereof) because I haven't needed it. Rating:  - Can I give it 0 stars?This is just awful -- I purchased Retrospect HD 2.0.144 several months ago for use with a Western Digital 200GB external disk drive. I was first surprised that there is *no* configurability -- you have to back up the entire disk and cannot exclude any files. I'm a developer and need to back up my work-in-progress every night between version control check-ins, and there are lots of huge intermediate files that could be excluded, but there is no such option. Yesterday, I accidentally deleted four source files and figured, hey, I can just restore them since they haven't changed since last week. But nooooo -- I launched Restrospect, selected "restore" and picked the last restore point for that drive. 12 hours later, it was still "scanning drive d:", but finally gave me a list of directories in the root of the drive. I tried to expand the tree for the files I need and it went away for another hour. Finally, I selected the whole tree (can't afford an hour each time I need to move down one level) and it's been "preparing for restore..." and "calculating time for restore..." for a while now. So this software is basically a toy. There are maybe 50,000 files in this tree, but you'd be surprised how quickly files accumulate. Also, EMC's support is a *joke* -- they want $70 just to talk to me on the phone. And I have no expectation that they will be able to solve this problem. This software apparently backs up fine, but don't expect to ever actually restore a file in a finite amount of time. And after all, isn't that the point. Rating: - Retrospect - stay awayThis is without doubt the worst experience I have ever had with software. I had been using Retrospect (older version) to back up, had a crash and attempted to recover files. First, the software will not install on the new laptop. Second, product support from manufacturer and distributor are a joke. There is more but why bother? STAY AWAY!
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