Retrospect vs Time Machine
Time Machine is not designed for businesses. Retrospect Backup is. It’s an insurance policy on your business data. You have insurance for your office, your house, your car, and your health. Your business data deserves one too.
Distributing hard drives to all of your employees is a recipe for failure. Employees are not motivated to regularly plug in a hard drive just for a backup, and you have no way to check if they did so. You don’t want to find out no one was using those hard drives only after you’ve lost data. Backups need to be automated, effortless, and centrally monitored.
You set up Time Machine for your employees, and you even set up Time Machine Server to centralize the backups and rudimentary monitoring. Time Machine Server gives you the sense that you’ve protected your business data, but you have no plan for ransomware, theft, or disaster. You need an offsite backup to truly protect your business.
Time Machine makes it easy to back up everything, but it’s remarkably hard to only back up certain files. Only documents? No. Only user folders? Only if you exclude every other path on every machine. Exclude all media? Forget it. Go buy a bigger destination. Without the ability to filter files and folders based on your business’s data usage, you’ll need to keep buying storage. You need a solution with powerful file filtering, file deduplication, and block-level deduplication.
Time Machine has its faults, but with custom code, you can work around it. Centralized monitoring? Python. Email notifications when there have been no backups? Ruby and SendGrid. Testing the system for bugs? Sometime next month... Custom code can work, if you have the knowledge and time to make it work, but you also have a hundred other tasks. Your backup system should be a professional solution built and tested for businesses like yours.
Time Machine is not designed for businesses. Retrospect Backup is. It’s an insurance policy on your business data. You have insurance for your office, your house, your car, and your health. Your business data deserves one too.
Time Machine does not tell you if it stopped running, and Time Machine Server includes only rudimentary management features. Retrospect provides centralized management for remote computers, NAS shares, external hard drives, and email accounts, and it includes email notifications as well as external monitoring integrations like Slack and an iOS app.
Time Machine does not migrate files or folders from one place to another or clone systems. Retrospect offers built-in migration for files, folders, or entire bootable systems, including extended attributes and ACLs, with extensive options for which files to replace if source and destination overlap. Every file is an exact clone, down to the byte.
Theft and disaster have always been important reasons for offsite backups, but now, ransomware (even on the Mac) is the most powerful. Ransomware will encrypt Time Machine backups just like any other file. Retrospect integrates with over a dozen cloud storage providers for offsite backups, connects securely to prevent access from malware and ransomware, and lets you transfer local backups to it in a couple clicks.
Time Machine backs up every hour. If you’d prefer a different schedule, you’ll need to open Terminal or download a third-party application. Retrospect has a set-and-forget backup schedule as well called ProactiveAI. It uses machine learning algorithms to optimize your backup window based on all of the data sources you’ve included. You can also set up a traditional backup schedule. Retrospect lets you choose.
Time Machine lets you exclude items from backups. If you want to only include your desktop, be prepared to exclude every other path on your hard drive. Retrospect has a powerful set of filters available, with inclusion and exclusion logic, to ensure you can back up only critical data (like documents) and ignore non-business areas (like your movie library).
With cross platform support for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Retrospect offers business backup with end-to-end security, email protection, and extensive customization–all at an affordable price for a small business.
Retrospect provides complete protection with backup, archive, and duplicate features built in.
File-level and system-level protection for your servers with point-in-time restores.
Deploy agents on every desktop and laptop to ensure complete protection across your entire infrastructure.
Retrospect supports more than twenty cloud storage providers, all seamlessly integrated with zero-knowledge security and no lock-in.
Backup scripts enable you to tailor a backup strategy that works best for your environment.
Our customers rave about their experiences with our excellent Support team, just a phone call or email away.
