TidBITS#624/01-Apr-02
=====================

  When was the last time you backed up your Mac OS X machine? The
  solution for many people is Retrospect 5.0 - Adam looks in depth
  at the new release in this week's issue. Also, Matt Neuburg starts
  a two-part examination of Unicode and what it means to you. In the
  news, KeyStrokes for Mac OS X provides helpful adaptive technology
  for disabled Mac users wanting to use the new operating system.
  (And no, we're not making any of this up!)

Topics:
    MailBITS/01-Apr-02
    Two Bytes of the Cherry: Unicode and Mac OS X, Part 1
    Retrospect 5.0 Enables Mac OS X Backups

<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-624.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2002/TidBITS#624_01-Apr-02.etx>

Copyright 2002 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
   Information: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Comments: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
   ---------------------------------------------------------------

This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
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* What's your OS X BACKUP PLAN? Dantz RETROSPECT BACKUP 5.0! <------- NEW!
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   ---------------------------------------------------------------

MailBITS/01-Apr-02
------------------

**Keyboard Accessibility for Mac OS X** -- In his TidBITS series
  on accessibility for disabled Macintosh users, Joe Clark bemoaned
  the state of adaptive technology in Mac OS X. Last week's release
  of KeyStrokes for Mac OS X from the Dutch company Niemeijer
  Consult could help improve Mac OS X's position in the adaptive
  technology world. KeyStrokes displays a graphical keyboard on the
  screen; users type by positioning the cursor over letters and
  clicking the button of a mouse, trackball, head pointer, or other
  pointing device. For those who can position the cursor but can't
  click a button, KeyStrokes provides a system-wide "dwell-based"
  utility that enables clicking, double-clicking, and click-and-drag
  by holding the cursor motionless for a short period of time over
  the desired target. Text can be entered into any application in
  Mac OS X, even those running in Classic. U.S. and international
  keyboard layouts are available and the program supports Command-
  key combinations, dead keys (for accents), and modifier key-click
  combinations. KeyStrokes for Mac OS X costs $200 and includes a
  copy of KeyStrokes 2.2 for System 7.1 through Mac OS 9.2; volume
  and upgrade discounts are available. For those who want to try it
  first, there's a fully functional demo. [ACE]

<http://www.assistiveware.com/keystrokes.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1189>


Two Bytes of the Cherry: Unicode and Mac OS X, Part 1
-----------------------------------------------------
  by Matt Neuburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

  If you're using Mac OS X, a massive revolution is proceeding
  unnoticed on your computer. No, I don't mean Unix, preemptive
  multitasking, or any other familiar buzzwords. I'm talking about
  text.

  How can text be revolutionary? Text is not sexy. We take text for
  granted, typing it, reading it, editing it, storing it. Text is
  one of the main reasons most people bought computers in the first
  place. It's a means, a medium; it's not an end, not something
  explicit. The keyboard lies under our hands; strike a key and the
  corresponding letter appears. What could be simpler?

  But the more you know about text and how it works on a computer,
  the more amazing it is that you can do any typing at all. There
  are issues of what keyboard you're using, how the physical keys
  map to virtual keycodes, how the virtual keycodes are represented
  as characters, how to draw the characters on the screen, and how
  store information about them in files. There are problems of
  languages, fonts, uppercase and lowercase, diacritics, sort order,
  and more.

  In this article I'll focus on just one aspect of text: Unicode.
  Whether or not you've heard of Unicode, it affects you. Mac OS X
  is a Unicode system. Its native strings are Unicode strings. Many
  of the fonts that come with Mac OS X are Unicode fonts.

  But there are problems. Mac OS X's transition to Unicode is far
  from complete. There are places where Unicode doesn't work, where
  it isn't implemented properly, where it gets in your way. Perhaps
  you've encountered some of these, shrugged, and moved on, never
  suspecting the cause. Well, from now on, perhaps you'll notice the
  problems a little more and shrug a little less. More important,
  you'll be prepared for the future, because Unicode is coming. It's
  heavily present on Mac OS X, and it's only going to become more
  so. Unicode is the future - your future. And as my favorite movie
  says, we are all interested in the future, since that is where we
  shall spend the rest of our lives.


**ASCII No Questions** -- To understand the future, we must start
  with the past.

  In the beginning was writing, the printing press, books, the
  typewriter, and in particular a special kind of typewriter for
  sending information across electrical wires - the teletype.
  Perhaps you've seen one in an old movie, clattering out a news
  story or a military order. Teletype machines worked by encoding
  typed letters of the alphabet as electrical impulses and decoding
  them on the other end.

  When computers started to be interactive and remotely operable,
  teletypes were a natural way to talk to them; and the first
  universal standard computer "alphabet" emerged, not without some
  struggle, from how teletypes worked. This was ASCII (pronounced
  "askey"), the American Standard Code for Information Interchange;
  and you can still see the teletype influence in the presence of
  its "control codes," so called because they helped control the
  teletype at the far end of the line. (For example, hitting
  Control-G sent a control code which made a bell ring on the
  remote teletype, to get the operator's attention - the ancestor
  of today's alert beep.)

  The United States being the major economic and technological force
  in computing, the ASCII characters were the capital and small
  letters of the Roman alphabet, along with some common typewriter
  punctuation and the control codes. The set originally comprised
  128 characters. That number is, of course, a power of 2 - no
  coincidence, since binary lies at the heart of computers.

  When I got an Apple IIc, I was astounded to find ASCII extended
  by another power of 2, to embrace 256 characters. This made sense
  mathematically, because 256 is 8 binary bits - a byte, which was
  the minimum unit of memory data. This was less wasteful, but it
  was far from clear what to do with the extra 128 characters, which
  were referred to as "high ASCII" to distinguish them from the
  original 128 "low ASCII" characters. The problem was the
  computer's monitor - its screen. In those days, screen
  representation of text was wired into the monitor's hardware,
  and low ASCII was all it could display.


**Flaunt Your Fonts, Watch Your Language** -- When the Macintosh
  came along in 1984, everything changed. The Mac's entire screen
  displayed graphics, and the computer itself, not the monitor
  hardware, had the job of constructing the letters when text was
  to be displayed. At the time this was stunning and absolutely
  revolutionary. A character could be anything whatever, and for
  the first time, people saw all 256 characters really being used.
  To access high ASCII, you pressed the Option key. What you saw
  when you did so was amazing: A bullet! A paragraph symbol!
  A c-cedilla! Thus arrived the MacRoman character set to which
  we've all become accustomed.

  Since the computer was drawing the character, you also had a
  choice of fonts - another revolution. After the delirium of
  playing with the Venice and San Francisco fonts started to
  wear off, users saw that this had big consequences for the
  representation of non-Roman languages. After all, no law tied
  the 256 keycodes to the 256 letters of the MacRoman character set.
  A different font could give you 256 _more_ letters - as the Symbol
  font amply demonstrated. This, in fact, is why I switched to a
  Mac. In short order I was typing Greek, Devanagari (the Sanskrit
  syllabary), and phonetic symbols. After years of struggling with
  international typewriters or filling in symbols by hand, I was
  now my own typesetter, and in seventh heaven.


**Trouble in Paradise** -- Heaven, however, had its limits.
  Suppose I wanted to print a document. Laser printers were
  expensive, so I had to print in a Mac lab where the computers
  didn't necessarily have the same fonts I did, and thus couldn't
  print my document properly. The same problem arose if I wanted to
  give a file to a colleague or a publisher who might not have the
  fonts I was using, and so couldn't view my document properly.

  Windows users posed yet another problem. The Windows character
  set was perversely different from the Mac. For example, WinLatin1
  (often referred to, somewhat inaccurately, as ISO 8859-1) places
  the upside-down interrogative that opens a Spanish question at
  code 191; but that character is 192 on Mac (where 191 is the
  Norwegian slashed-o).

  And even among Mac users, "normal" fonts came in many linguistic
  varieties, because the 256 characters of MacRoman do not suffice
  for every language that uses a variation of the Roman alphabet.
  Consider Turkish, for instance. MacRoman includes a Turkish
  dotless-i, but not a Turkish s-cedilla. So on a Turkish Mac the
  s-cedilla replaces the American Mac's "fl" ligature. A parallel
  thing happens on Windows, where (for example) Turkish s-cedilla
  and the Old English thorn characters occupy the same numeric
  spot in different language systems.


**Tower of Babel** -- None of this would count as problematic were
  it not for communications. If your computing is confined to your
  own office and your own printer and your own documents, you can
  work just fine. But cross-platform considerations introduce a
  new twist, and of course the rise of the Internet really brought
  things to a head. Suddenly people whose base systems differed
  were sending each other email and reading each other's Web pages.
  Conventions were established for coping, but these work only to
  the extent that people and software obey them. If you've ever
  received email from someone named "=?iso-8859-1?Q?St=E9phane?=,"
  or if you've read a Web page where quotes appeared as a funny-
  looking capital O, you've experienced some form of the problem.

  Also, since fonts don't travel across the Internet, characters
  that depend on a particular font may not be viewable at all. HTML
  can ask that certain characters should appear in a certain font
  on your machine when you view my page, but a fat lot of good that
  will do if you don't have that font.

  Finally, there is a major issue I haven't mentioned yet: for some
  writing systems, 256 characters is nowhere near enough. An obvious
  example is Chinese, which requires several thousand characters.

  Enter Unicode.


**The Premise and the Promise** -- What Unicode proposes is simple
  enough: increase the number of bytes used to represent each
  character. For example, if you use two bytes per character,
  you can have 65,536 characters - enough to represent the Roman
  alphabet plus various accents and diacritics, plus Greek, Russian,
  Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, the core symbols of various Asian
  languages, and many others.

  What's new here isn't the codification of character codes to
  represent different languages; the various existing character sets
  already did that, albeit clumsily. Nor is it the use of a double-
  byte system; such systems were already in use to represent Asian
  characters. What's new is the grand unification into a single
  character set embracing all characters at once. In other words,
  Unicode would do away with character set variations across
  systems and fonts. In fact, in theory a single (huge) font
  could potentially contain all needed characters.

  It turns out, actually, that even 65,536 symbols aren't enough,
  once you start taking into account specialized scholars'
  requirements for conventional markings and historical characters
  (about which the folks who set the Unicode standards have often
  proved not to be as well informed as they like to imagine).
  Therefore Unicode has recently been extended to a potential 16
  further sets of 65,536 characters (called "supplementary planes");
  the size of the potential character set thus approximates a
  million, with each character represented by at most 4 bytes. The
  first supplementary plane is already being populated with such
  things as Gothic; musical and mathematical symbols; Mycenean
  (Linear B); and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The evolving standard
  is, not surprisingly, the subject of various political, cultural,
  technical, and scholarly struggles.

<http://www.unicode.org/>
<http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/principles.html>

  What has all this to do with you, you ask? It's simple. As I
  said at the outset, if you're a Mac OS X user, Unicode is on
  your computer, right now. But where? In the second half of
  this article, I'll show you.


Retrospect 5.0 Enables Mac OS X Backups
---------------------------------------
  by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

  Last week we ran out of room to write much about Dantz
  Development's release of Retrospect 5.0, the lack of which,
  for many people serious about their backups (see our "Backed Up
  Today?" series of articles on the topic), was the main obstacle
  preventing upgrades to Mac OS X.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06758>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1041>

  First off, I want to explain briefly why we had to wait so long
  for Retrospect 5.0, and why making it compatible with Mac OS X was
  much harder than it would appear. In Mac OS X, Apple essentially
  bolted the classic Mac OS on top of a Unix operating system.
  Although Apple did a generally good job of making this connection
  invisible to users, the differences between the way the Mac OS and
  Unix handle files are glaring to an application like Retrospect
  that needs to be able to restore files exactly as it backed them
  up. Mac OS files have different attributes and permissions than
  Unix files, and Mac OS files can even have resource forks, which
  Unix files lack. Plus, in the Mac OS, the only type of links are
  aliases, whereas Unix offers several different types of links.
  Even case-sensitivity is different between the two.

  The practical upshot of these differences was that Cocoa (and
  Unix) applications couldn't generally see the Mac OS attributes
  and resource forks, and Classic applications couldn't handle the
  Unix attributes, permissions, and links. The happy medium had to
  be a specially written Carbon application that had been coded to
  handle both Unix and Macintosh file information. To address this,
  Dantz initially released a free Retrospect Client for Mac OS X
  Preview that worked with a plug-in to Retrospect 4.3 under
  Mac OS 9 to back up Mac OS X-based machines; it was basically
  a hack that worked, but wasn't ideal.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06395>

  Operating system support was necessary as well, and it wasn't
  until Mac OS X 10.1.2, released in late December of 2001, that
  Apple fixed all the bugs that had previously made it impossible
  to restore a working Mac OS X installation from a backup. Dantz
  immediately released a free Retrospect 5.0 Preview that ran under
  Mac OS X and could back up and restore properly. Dantz then spent
  the last few months doing final testing and packaging, leading up
  to last week's release of Retrospect 5.0, which can do essentially
  everything Retrospect users are accustomed to doing, but with Mac
  OS X as well as Mac OS 9 (plus Windows, though I haven't had time
  to test Windows-compatibility yet). Aside from this fundamental
  compatibility with a mixed operating system environment, there
  are a few welcome changes under the hood that make Retrospect
  all the more useful. These changes fall into two major categories:
  internal changes to Retrospect's backup capabilities and changes
  necessary for Mac OS X.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06678>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06687>


**New Under the Hood** -- The most interesting of Retrospect's
  internal changes is the elimination of a design that severely
  limited the utility of backing up to external hard disks with
  what Retrospect calls File Backup Sets. In earlier versions of
  Retrospect, the catalog that stores the names of the backed-up
  files lives in the resource fork of a File Backup Set;
  unfortunately, resource forks cannot grow larger than 16 MB.
  That effectively limited the number of files that could be stored
  in a File Backup Set to between 60,000 to 75,000, regardless of
  the size of those files. In Retrospect 5.0, when the 16 MB limit
  is reached, Retrospect creates a separate .cat file to hold the
  catalog. These two files must be stored in the same folder and
  may not be renamed.

  With the costs of hot-swappable FireWire hard disks as low as they
  are, this relatively small change simplifies the use of hard disks
  as dedicated backup media. Retrospect's EasyScript feature, which
  helps you build a backup script, now gives you this option as
  well. For instance, you could buy three 80 GB hard disks for less
  than $700 total, create a File Backup Set on each one, and rotate
  between them for a backup system that compares extremely favorably
  to tape drive systems. A set of 160 GB drives at $400 each would
  be even more cost-effective. Don't forget about archiving for
  posterity (I just had reason to recover 400 MB of software from
  archived backups from 1995 through 1998), but it wouldn't be
  difficult to remove the drive mechanism from a case, swap in
  a new mechanism, and store the old one for safe-keeping. More
  elegant than buying three separate drives would be getting one
  of Granite Digital's FireVue Hot-Swap Drive Systems, with which
  you essentially buy only one $230 case plus $30 trays for drive
  mechanisms that you swap in and out of the case. I haven't tried
  one, but they sound useful.

<http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg26_firewireidehotswapdrive.htm>

  For people working with very large files, as can happen when
  editing audio or video, Retrospect 5.0 can now back up files
  larger than 2 GB. Most people probably didn't run into that
  limitation before, but lots of people will be pleased to know that
  Retrospect 5.0 now supports all currently shipping Apple optical
  drives (see Dantz's Web site for a complete compatibility list).
  Since Apple uses drives from various manufacturers, the level of
  support varies slightly - with some drives, Dantz was forced to
  work around drive firmware errors by requiring that you use CD-R
  media rather than CD-RW media (the other option was to not support
  the drive at all). Finally, the Advanced Driver Kit is no longer
  required for high-capacity tape drives.

<http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=compatibility_list>
<http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=osx_apple_opt_compat_dev>


**Mac OS X Changes** -- Obviously, the huge change in Retrospect
  5.0 is the capability both to run under Mac OS X (10.1.2 and
  later) and to back up Mac OS X files from Macs running Retrospect
  Client under Mac OS X 10.1.2 and later. This detail is important -
  if you back up a Mac that has both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X installed
  while it's booted into Mac OS 9, Retrospect can't access Mac OS X
  file permissions; and although it will back up the files, restores
  of those files won't give you a working Mac OS X system. Likewise,
  although you can back up files from mounted servers without
  using Retrospect Client, privileges won't be saved for later
  restoration.

  In short, if you want to back up Mac OS X files such that they can
  be restored properly, make sure Mac OS X is the active operating
  system when backing up, and if you're backing up a Mac OS X
  machine over the network, use Retrospect Client rather than
  merely mounting the server.

  Retrospect Clients have been updated for Mac OS X (Retrospect 5.0
  Clients under Mac OS 9 are identical to Retrospect 4.3 Clients
  other than the version number), and they work only over TCP/IP,
  not AppleTalk. One tip: if an interrupted backup causes a Mac OS X
  Retrospect Client to think it's in use when it's not, Command-
  click the Off button to stop it, then click the On button to start
  it again. The same trick (toggling Retrospect Client off, then on)
  works in Mac OS 9 as well, though a normal click on the Off button
  will suffice.

  Dantz also updated Retrospect's interface to support Aqua, updated
  the default selectors that back up specific sets of files, and
  changed the location of various files (preferences and logs now
  live in Library/Preferences/Retrospect and catalog files now
  default to being stored in the current user's Documents folder).
  The Retro.Startup extension that launched Retrospect automatically
  for unattended backup is now called RetroRun under Mac OS X, and
  it's installed in Library/StartupItems. RetroRun can automatically
  launch Retrospect even when no user is logged in to a Mac OS X
  machine. A memory leak has been reported in RetroRun; I'd expect
  to see an update soon (unfortunately, removing RetroRun from
  the StartupItems folder won't help for long, since Retrospect
  recreates it on launch).

  Retrospect 5.0 provides a "Live Restore" feature for restoring a
  entire Mac OS X machine. If it isn't already in a bootable state,
  you must first install a base Mac OS X system, upgrading as
  necessary to bring it up to the same version as you're restoring,
  then install Retrospect, and then perform the restore. I haven't
  yet had an opportunity to test a Live Restore, though it's an
  important one. Restoring can prove a little tricky with regard
  to Mac OS X file permissions; I recommend reading Dantz's
  Knowledgebase article on the topic and testing some restores
  in a non-critical situation.

<http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=knowledgebase_article&id=794>

  I think it's an open question as to whether you should run
  Retrospect in Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X if you have the choice. Dantz
  says one benefit of running in Mac OS X is that Mac OS X's
  improved memory management makes it possible for Retrospect
  to back up volumes containing hundreds of thousands of files
  (previously, Retrospect could run out of memory scanning those
  files). Plus, Dantz says Retrospect runs faster as a background
  application in Mac OS X thanks to Mac OS X's approach to
  multitasking. I won't quibble with those claims, but for non-
  extreme situations, Retrospect running by itself on an older
  PowerPC-based Mac under Mac OS 9 may be a more economical and
  efficient approach, particularly if you have a slow 10 Mbps
  network that will eliminate any performance gained by using
  a fast Mac.


**Business Model Changes** -- There's no question that Dantz has
  been among the Mac companies that have suffered as a result of
  Apple's forced march to Mac OS X. The uncertainty surrounding
  Mac OS X slowed Mac sales to large organizations that take backup
  seriously and forced Dantz to expend a great deal of back-and-
  forth effort with Apple just to make Retrospect work properly with
  Mac OS X. These problems have resulted in Dantz starting to charge
  for telephone support and making pricing changes in the different
  versions of Retrospect.

<http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=support_matrix>

  There are now four different versions of Retrospect with different
  capabilities, aimed at different markets:

<http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=feature_comparison_mac>

* Retrospect Express has a subset of Retrospect's full
  functionality, and it no longer works on Macs running AppleShare
  IP (or Mac OS X Server). It's aimed at individual users backing
  up to CD-R or external hard disks. It lists for $80, is available
  directly from Dantz for $50, and upgrades from previous versions
  cost $20. It has also appeared in bundles of other utilities in
  the past; that may happen again.

* Retrospect Desktop also can't run on servers, but it supports
  tape drives (and tape libraries of up to eight tapes) and all
  of Retrospect's other features. You can buy Retrospect Clients
  separately for network backup, but they can be added only if
  they're in the same Class C subnet, such as 192.168.1.xxx.
  Retrospect Desktop is sufficient for most small offices. It lists
  for $250, costs $150 direct from Dantz, and upgrades are $100.
  I suspect you'll find Retrospect Desktop bundled with most new
  tape drive purchases.

* Retrospect Workgroup can back up one AppleShare IP or Mac OS X
  Server machine if it's installed on that Mac, comes with licenses
  for 20 Retrospect Client workstations (which you can add by DNS
  name, IP address, or Subnet Broadcast), and supports tape
  libraries with more than 8 tapes. Larger offices or installations
  needing to back up very large amounts of data should use
  Retrospect Workgroup. It costs $500 and upgrades are $200.

* The new Retrospect Server is identical to Retrospect Workgroup
  Edition, but can back up multiple servers and includes licenses
  for 100 Retrospect Client workstations, making it appropriate
  for large organizations. It costs $800, and $350 upgrades from
  previous versions of Retrospect Desktop and Workgroup are
  available for a limited time.

  The primary advantage of ordering directly from Dantz is that
  you can download the software and have it immediately, but the
  downside is that you'll pay a bit more. Look to resellers like
  TidBITS sponsor Small Dog Electronics for significantly cheaper
  prices on Retrospect Workgroup and Retrospect Server; other
  retailers also seemed to have prices slightly lower than Dantz's
  on Retrospect Express and Retrospect Desktop as well. No resellers
  had Retrospect in stock yet, though that should change within
  a week or two.

<http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=quick_order>

  French, German, and Japanese localized versions are scheduled for
  release in the second quarter of 2002. International users can buy
  an English version today and then upgrade to the corresponding
  localized product for free when it becomes available.


**Initial Impressions** -- I've been putting Retrospect, primarily
  the Server version, through its paces, and although testing
  backups can be a tedious process given the amounts of data that
  need to be moved across my 10 Mbps wired Ethernet and (even
  slower) AirPort networks, I've come to a few conclusions.

  First, and most importantly, Retrospect 5.0 works almost exactly
  the same as Retrospect 4.3 did. There was no learning curve; all
  of the visible features work as they did in the past. Under
  Mac OS X, Retrospect asks for administrator passwords at
  appropriate times, and although its interface looks a little
  different to support Aqua, I haven't noticed any significant
  differences.

  On initial launch, Retrospect offered to import settings from
  previous versions; it appeared to do that flawlessly, although
  I might try a fresh start if I were troubleshooting a problem
  with Retrospect, since that would seem to be a place where
  subtle corruption could creep in.

  As it turns out, I have been doing a lot of troubleshooting in an
  effort to help Dantz isolate an internal consistency check error
  that I and several other people have experienced. I've also seen
  several situations where my Mac crashed while Retrospect was
  backing up, although I can't specifically attribute those
  crashes to Retrospect. Plus, TidBITS Managing Editor Jeff Carlson
  experienced a problem where Retrospect would back up one of his
  partitions correctly, but wouldn't compare it. Luckily, as has
  been the case with Retrospect over the years, these bugs haven't
  caused any data loss in backups.

<http://support.dantz.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=
Desktopworkgrupx&Number=2630>

  This sounds somewhat dire, and although I certainly wish I hadn't
  experienced any problems, years of using Retrospect have taught me
  that it's often an electronic canary in the digital mines. For
  those unfamiliar with the analogy, miners used to bring a canary
  down into the mine shaft as an early warning system - if noxious
  gases caused the canary to keel over, the miners knew to get out.
  Because of its need to operate at the highest possible speeds with
  unusual storage devices, all without losing a single bit of data,
  it's not unusual to see Retrospect throw an error when everything
  else appears to work fine. A friend once told me of a story about
  a large company that upgraded a Cisco router to new firmware
  containing a bug which lost one packet in a million. The bug went
  unnoticed until Retrospect started reporting errors, because
  although one packet in a million doesn't sound like much, it adds
  up to a real problem when you're backing up gigabytes of data.

  In the end, for many cautious users (myself included), the
  release of Retrospect 5.0 makes it possible to upgrade primary
  workstations to Mac OS X. Although a few other backup programs
  have appeared in recent months, including FWB's BackUp ToolKit
  (the same as Tri-Edre's Tri-Backup), Qdea's Synchronize Pro X,
  Randall Voth's Synk, CMS Peripherals' Automatic Backup System,
  and PSoft's iMsafe, these utilities are appropriate primarily for
  individual users backing up to media that can be mounted on the
  desktop (no tape drives). For those who need to back up multiple
  Macs to any media, including high-capacity tape drives, Retrospect
  5.0 is the only option on the Mac that also provides archiving
  and preserves resource forks, HFS+ metadata, Unix permissions
  and group ownership, and hard-linked files.

<http://www.fwb.com/cs/btk/main.html>
<http://www.qdea.com/pages/pages-sprox/sprox1.html>
<http://mypage.uniserve.ca/~rvoth/synkx.html>
<http://www.cmsproducts.com/products/abs.htm>
<http://homepage.mac.com/iMsafe/>



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