Retrospect 6.1: Slow-downs continue; problems performing backup; unsupported drives

Retrospect 6.x has been implicated in a number of instances where overall system slow-down or performance drops in particular third-party applications are apparent. (See this article about Retrospect potentially hampering performance of Adobe CS2 applications, and another where the RetroRun component of Retrospect results in system-wide unresponsiveness).

MacFixIt reader Scott Rose, along with a number of others, reports that Retrospect 6.1 does not deliver relief from these problems.

Scott writes:

"Unfortunately, Retrospect 6.1 does not solve the systemwide slow-downs in Tiger that we have been experiencing reliably and consistently on ALL machines where we are running Retrospect, and which have been happening since Retrospect 6.0 was released.

"To recap this very serious issue: Whenever Retrospect 6.0 or 6.1 kicks in for a backup on Tiger, every single running application slows down to a crawl, including the Finder. Every program becomes unusable because it so slow, and Microsoft Word actually hangs with a spinning beach ball. Every single application must be quit out of and relaunched again, in order to get speed back again. (Word must be force-quit of; the Finder must be relaunched.)

"This bug is reproducible 100% of the time, without fail, on 3 of the machines where we have tried this on. This is on an 'erase and install' of Tiger (10.4.2), and a complete uninstall/reinstall of Retrospect. The bug started with Retrospect 6.0, and it continues to happen in 6.1.

So far the only solution, albeit undesirable, is to move to a less frequent backup routine or restrict backups to offline hours until Dantz resolves the issue.

If you are experiencing similar issues, please let us know.

Erroneous backup limit message MacFixIt reader Bob Sable reports receiving an erroneous backup size limit error message under Retrospect 6.1. He writes:

"I installed Retrospect 6.1.126 in order to back up Tiger (10.4.2) to an external firewire hard drive. It stalls and I get this message:

"Can't add that much data to backup set. The limit is 2.0 GB"

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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