Retrospect is so aged and unresponsive, after using it for more than 11 years here, that I’m moving away from it for our backups. In 2008 the EMC rep at Macworld said a new version would be out by the fall of ‘08. EMC missed that date, not a good sign for its commitment to Mac. Really now: OS X is just another Unix under the covers.

Time Machine gets the vote here for the newer systems (those running Leopard). Yes, it takes a little trick to get a Time Machine drive ready to boot up in case of a crash, but it’s worth it. Mac OSX Hints has the process here. Well worth the time.

As for Retrospect: Yes, as a business we’ve used it, but it takes tinkering. I’ve probably spent the equivalent of 10 hard drives in rewritable CDs and then DVDs staying backed up. It might be worthwhile to have several hundred versions of the InBox from your e-mail program, but I’ve only looked at a handful of these snapshots over a decade. SuperDuper is far superior to keep a current version of your drives backed up. At $29, it’s too cheap to overlook.

Once a week I schedule a Retro backup onto the DVD plastic. I’m not sure why, but there’s all those years of habit.

Offsite storage is good. I use CrashPlan on the newest iMac and BackJack for our Tiger systems. Each is about $45 a year for storage over the Internet to a remote server. The latter is great at telling you what it’s doing, right down to an e-mail verification. It works the way Mozy did here during 2008, until EMC (them again!) spoiled its Mac interface.

Just this morning I read of another method for offsite backup: Find a Mac buddy who you can have coffee with once a week and swap backup hard drives with them. Do a Carbon Copy Clone of your drive before you go have your grande latte. That way you’re at worst only 7 days behind on a backup in case of a fire. Be serious about the relative value of an offsite backup in the aftermath of a fire. A billboard near my office reminds me that more than 4 out of every 5 businesses — small or large — cannot resume operations after a disaster.