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Rating: 
Summary: Retrospect Backup Express 5.5 Has The Best Disaster Recovery
Review: For an entire week, I've tried disaster recovery software from leading vendors including Norton Ghost 2001 v.6.5, Veritas VERITAS Backup Exec Desktop Pro v.4.5, and Powerquest Drive Image v.4.0. None of them could do the job they promised on my laptop. Both Norton Ghost and Drive Image require you to boot to DOS from a floppy disk to run their software, which is not a familiar environment for most Windows users. Besides, if you have a swappable floppy drive and CD-ROM system like mine, it will not work as you can only have either the floppy drive or CD-ROM drive at a time, not both. After booting to DOS, the users are quired to provide the DOS driver for their mass storage device, which is almost impossible to obtain from most devices' manufacturers nowadays, they no longer support DOS. Veritas' "disaster recovery" feature failed to work as promised with too many errors reading system files. Disaster recovery software is supposed to be able to read open files as many system files are always open at any given time.Another plus with Dantz's Retrospect Express Backup is it's the least expensive product among the other 3 and does a good job as promised. Even though it had a little problem restoring my BusLink 20 GB external USB hard drive, I was able to re-install the Windows USB-IDE Bridge driver quickly, re-established access to the backup set on the drive, and restored to the original system state without any problem, complete with all other drivers including the difficult-to-install Lucent Orinoco Residential Gateway wireless LAN. Other products require you to prepare disaster recovery info on floppy disks (Veritas requires as many as 6 floppy disks for Windows 2000 plus the backup media), Retrospect Express Backup has the unique ability of its kind to prepare a single bootable CD to greatly simply the recovering process. I'd give this product 5 star if it weren't for the small USB-IDE glitch. Excellent product!
Rating:
Summary: Retrospect Backup Express 5.5 Has The Best Disaster Recovery
Review: For an entire week, I've tried disaster recovery software from leading vendors including Norton Ghost 2001 v.6.5, Veritas VERITAS Backup Exec Desktop Pro v.4.5, and Powerquest Drive Image v.4.0. None of them could do the job they promised on my laptop. Both Norton Ghost and Drive Image require you to boot to DOS from a floppy disk to run their software, which is not a familiar environment for most Windows users. Besides, if you have a swappable floppy drive and CD-ROM system like mine, it will not work as you can only have either the floppy drive or CD-ROM drive at a time, not both. After booting to DOS, the users are quired to provide the DOS driver for their mass storage device, which is almost impossible to obtain from most devices' manufacturers nowadays, they no longer support DOS. Veritas' "disaster recovery" feature failed to work as promised with too many errors reading system files. Disaster recovery software is supposed to be able to read open files as many system files are always open at any given time. Another plus with Dantz's Retrospect Express Backup is it's the least expensive product among the other 3 and does a good job as promised. Even though it had a little problem restoring my BusLink 20 GB external USB hard drive, I was able to re-install the Windows USB-IDE Bridge driver quickly, re-established access to the backup set on the drive, and restored to the original system state without any problem, complete with all other drivers including the difficult-to-install Lucent Orinoco Residential Gateway wireless LAN. Other products require you to prepare disaster recovery info on floppy disks (Veritas requires as many as 6 floppy disks for Windows 2000 plus the backup media), Retrospect Express Backup has the unique ability of its kind to prepare a single bootable CD to greatly simply the recovering process. I'd give this product 5 star if it weren't for the small USB-IDE glitch. Excellent product!
Rating:
Summary: Good Buy
Review: Great buy for a good price. Is supposed to support all kind of storage hardware. Works perfect with my CDRW, Hard Disk and SuperDrive. Its auto configuration to these hardware is a definate plus point. The only bad part is that its for just Windows OS, and has no support for other OS. So if you are a win user and plan on remaining a win user, and have backup needs Retrospect Express is the way to go.
Rating: 
Summary: May As Well Buy An Empty Box
Review: I couldn't get any use out of this software. The manual was brief, (excessively concise), it wasn't clearly written. More of the manual was taken up by foreign languages than anything else, a wasted opportunity to tell me something useful. The manual told me that it would wipe out any pre-existing files on my destination backup disk. I could find no way to backup my C:\ hard drive to my second serial hard drive, which has other stuff on it that I didn't want to be wiped out. The program asked me if I wanted to install drivers for my CD-RW drive, and when I clicked "Yes" I was told that it only covered Windows 95 and 2000, saying nothing about Windows '98. An empty box would be a better purchase!!
Rating:
Summary: May As Well Buy An Empty Box
Review: I couldn't get any use out of this software. The manual was brief, (excessively concise), it wasn't clearly written. More of the manual was taken up by foreign languages than anything else, a wasted opportunity to tell me something useful. The manual told me that it would wipe out any pre-existing files on my destination backup disk. I could find no way to backup my C:\ hard drive to my second serial hard drive, which has other stuff on it that I didn't want to be wiped out. The program asked me if I wanted to install drivers for my CD-RW drive, and when I clicked "Yes" I was told that it only covered Windows 95 and 2000, saying nothing about Windows '98. An empty box would be a better purchase!!
Rating:
Summary: Just guessing
Review: I haven't used this product. But let's clear up one thing: Retrospect was originally written for the Mac. I used it to set up a system that automatically backed up 17 Macs at night and it worked very well. If Retrospect Express is as fine a product as Retrospect, I would revise my review to 5 stars, but right now I'm just guessing.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent software
Review: I'd read great reviews of the software, so I decided to buy. Wow -- it works much better than any other software I've used. I especially like being able to do incremental backups that are complete. The only thing I like more about the sw is that restores are very easy -- everything goes back as it was in a single step even though I did several different backup sessions.
Rating:
Summary: Junk
Review: Not compatible with Mac 9.1 with INTERNAL CD-RW DRIVE. Macintosh blames Dantz, and Dantz blames Macintosh.
Rating:
Summary: Junk
Review: Not compatible with Mac 9.1 with INTERNAL CD-RW DRIVE. Macintosh blames Dantz, and Dantz blames Macintosh.
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