Don’t forget about archiving for posterity (I just had reason to recover 400 MB of software from archived backups from 1995 through 1998), but it wouldn’t be difficult to remove the drive mechanism from a case, swap in a new mechanism, and store the old one for safe-keeping. A set of 160 GB drives at $400 each would be even more cost-effective. For instance, you could buy three 80 GB hard disks for less than $700 total, create a File Backup Set on each one, and rotate between them for a backup system that compares extremely favorably to tape drive systems. Retrospect’s EasyScript feature, which helps you build a backup script, now gives you this option as well. With the costs of hot-swappable FireWire hard disks as low as they are, this relatively small change simplifies the use of hard disks as dedicated backup media. These two files must be stored in the same folder and may not be renamed. In Retrospect 5.0, when the 16 MB limit is reached, Retrospect creates a separate. That effectively limited the number of files that could be stored in a File Backup Set to between 60,000 to 75,000, regardless of the size of those files. In earlier versions of Retrospect, the catalog that stores the names of the backed-up files lives in the resource fork of a File Backup Set unfortunately, resource forks cannot grow larger than 16 MB. New Under the Hood - The most interesting of Retrospect’s internal changes is the elimination of a design that severely limited the utility of backing up to external hard disks with what Retrospect calls File Backup Sets. These changes fall into two major categories: internal changes to Retrospect’s backup capabilities and changes necessary for Mac OS X. Aside from this fundamental compatibility with a mixed operating system environment, there are a few welcome changes under the hood that make Retrospect all the more useful. Dantz then spent the last few months doing final testing and packaging, leading up to last week’s release of Retrospect 5.0, which can do essentially everything Retrospect users are accustomed to doing, but with Mac OS X as well as Mac OS 9 (plus Windows, though I haven’t had time to test Windows-compatibility yet). Dantz immediately released a free Retrospect 5.0 Preview that ran under Mac OS X and could back up and restore properly. Operating system support was necessary as well, and it wasn’t until Mac OS X 10.1.2, released in late December of 2001, that Apple fixed all the bugs that had previously made it impossible to restore a working Mac OS X installation from a backup. To address this, Dantz initially released a free Retrospect Client for Mac OS X Preview that worked with a plug-in to Retrospect 4.3 under Mac OS 9 to back up Mac OS X-based machines it was basically a hack that worked, but wasn’t ideal. The happy medium had to be a specially written Carbon application that had been coded to handle both Unix and Macintosh file information. The practical upshot of these differences was that Cocoa (and Unix) applications couldn’t generally see the Mac OS attributes and resource forks, and Classic applications couldn’t handle the Unix attributes, permissions, and links. Even case-sensitivity is different between the two. Plus, in the Mac OS, the only type of links are aliases, whereas Unix offers several different types of links. Mac OS files have different attributes and permissions than Unix files, and Mac OS files can even have resource forks, which Unix files lack. Although Apple did a generally good job of making this connection invisible to users, the differences between the way the Mac OS and Unix handle files are glaring to an application like Retrospect that needs to be able to restore files exactly as it backed them up. In Mac OS X, Apple essentially bolted the classic Mac OS on top of a Unix operating system. Last week we ran out of room to write much about Dantz Development’s release of Retrospect 5.0, the lack of which, for many people serious about their backups (see our "Backed Up Today?" series of articles on the topic), was the main obstacle preventing upgrades to Mac OS X.įirst off, I want to explain briefly why we had to wait so long for Retrospect 5.0, and why making it compatible with Mac OS X was much harder than it would appear. #1650: Cloud storage changes for Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive quirky printing problem.#1651: Dealing with leading zeroes in spreadsheet data, removing ad tracking from ckbk.#1652: OS updates, DPReview shuttered, LucidLink cloud storage.#1653: Apple Music Classical review, Authory service for writers, WWDC 2023 dates announced.1654: Urgent OS security updates, upgrading to macOS 13 Ventura, using smart speakers while temporarily blind.
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