Product Description: Retrospect Express HD protects your music, photos, videos, e-mail, games, tax returns, schoolwork, computer settings, important documents -- everything! Protecting your Windows PC is easy and quick. A wizard guides you through three simple steps: Choose what to protect, select a hard drive to store your backups, and set a schedule. Automatically back up your PC to any available hard drive. Other backup software requires time-consuming full backups every week. Retrospect's award-winning technology captures just new or changed data - forever. Retrospect returns your entire computer to its exact state at a prior point in time. You don't need to re-install applications, download updates, and personalize your settings. Retrospect does it all. Avoids long weekly full backups by capturing just new or changed data -- forever Restores a single file or an entire PC to a prior point in time Backs up files in use, including Microsoft Outlook files Keeps just the most current version or all past versions of your data Removes outdated backups automatically to free disk space Compresses backups to maximize storage Enables easy backup drive rotation for extra protection System Requirements - 1.0 GHz or higher processor / 256 MB of RAM (512 MB recommended) / Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP (32-bit or x64) / 500 MB of available hard drive for storing backups, including USB, FireWire (IEEE 1394), eSATA, or networked hard drives / TCP/IP networking if backing up to a network hard drive
Very buggy with non-existent support Had problems installing and using this software and I am a computer professional. I emailed support and got no response. When I then called for help they said that their phone support cost $69 - I pointed out that this was more than the software (which never even worked!) and the customer service rep. simply responded with "I don't make the rules. Have a nice day." and just hung up the phone on me.
Rude, non-existent product support and it's probably because they get flooded with problems. Stay away from this company!
THIS HAS A SERIOUS BUG EMC REFUSES TO FIX-DO NOT BUY IT!!! I bought and installed this software several months ago. As I typed or dictated, the window would suddenly lose focus every 5 to 10 minutes and my typing or dictation would be lost until I noticed. It was frustrating. But then, when I used my computer to give a presentation to a client in PowerPoint, it lost focus and just hung. Every 5 minutes!! Using msconfig, I finally traced it to this #$*&(#$ software. I looked on their website and sure enough, they acknowledge the bug but have never fixed it. There is no solution and no work around. It appears they are focused on porting to the Mac to get more suckers. I uninstalled their software and will never buy anything from them again. I suggest you save yourself the pain I suffered through and find a different backup program.
Imperfect Solution DO NOT use with VISTA Unlike a lot of reviewers I have had absolutely no issue with either installing or backing up my data - but then again I always log in as the ADMINSTRATOR on Windoze XP - I have used version 1.1 on XP PRO for nearly 3 years and upgraded to this version as a cheap solution - particularly if you don't buy from Amazon, for use on a new Vista machine.
To be fair this software works great under XP - it saved my bacon countless times over the last three years BUT it is next to useless with Windoze Vista ... sure the backup is efficient, incremental and scheduled backups work a treat BUT don't think for one moment it will restore Vista to a working state ..... I got nothing but errors after restoring a Vista PC. Fortunately I had a disc image created with Acer eRecovery management which I used to restore the OS plus applications and then restored my data from the Retrospect Express HD backup.
Consequently I have donated this software to my son for use on his XP Home machine, meanwhile I am in search of a better solution, i.e. Acronis or Norton .... there must be something better out there????
Don't understand some of the reviews You can definately choose to backup more that just the entire hd. You can choose individual folders if you want. My friend uses it to just back up one huge folder that has all his business files.
I must admit that I've never actually used it to restore anything yet so I can't testify how well it would do that, but it's been backing up my hd faithfully for over a year every Monday morning at 6am. Installation was a breeze. However, the documentation and user interface is poor. The explanations as to how the program works is also insufficient. I'd like to see more of a well written explanation as to what it's doing and how it works.
No matter what I do, I can't make it work! This program came with a hard drive I purchased, and I thought, WOW, backup software. That is, until I tried to make it function. I never saw anything so user un-friendly. I spent probably 12 hours, and still can't get it to save a system restore and the documentation stinks.
Why can't somebody come up with a reliable, easy to use back up program that works??????
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
