NO to Mezzo, YES to Retrospect?

[Fraxby]

I have owned Mezzo for about 18 months and have never had a usable version between 3.7 to 4.2. I totally regret buying it as every time it gets updated, something really important is broken, at least for my needs. The Kelloggs are good guys but something is wrong with a company that releases broken software over such a long period. Retrospect is daunting at first but it works really well. If they could start writing catalog info it would be very nice. I want to sell my copy of Mezzo if I can figure out how to do a transfer of ownership.

[tomhartman]

It sounds like Pro Tools 6 will be making some of these programs unnecessary with it's back up functions built in.
Of course it's not going to replace tape, but for those of us who don't have HOURS of sessions to back up every day, having PTools backup to a "backup" drive will be great.

Does Retrospect backup to DVD yet?

[kkfaudio]

Hi..

I've been using mezzo since 1995 in an audio post world without any problems. Backing up to 2 sets of media of course has saved me once or twice, but never any loss of data.

EXCEPT for a crazy problem I'm having now. Please see my post in "storage subsystems" to read more, and hopefully offer some thoughts.

Until this, I've never had a reason to dislike mezzo.

Kevin

[dstagl]

I've been using Retrospect for about 3 years now without problems. You have to have your own file organization together to use it, but it works. I believe it does support DVD's now. I've used it to burn to CD-R's, but it takes forever and a day.

Dave

[wolfhound]

Sorry Sampleheads...I guess I'll never post an opinion again.....my bad....

[jooky]

Those of you using optical media - do you ever have errors on the disc? I've tried using CDR's as media and found that often times there were errors which made the disc unusable. Our studio has been backing up to DDS tape (with Retrospect) for 5 years now with only 1 tape having been eaten by a dying drive. It's my impression that tape seems more stable as a backup/archive medium, plus the capacity is higher.

[jeremyroberts]

hi wolfhound-

Opinions and facts should not be mixed up...

Opinion about a product's feature set should be based on the facts.

The fact is, retrospect indeed has the functionality, that in your opinion, it doesn't.

jr

[jimmycrack]

I used Mezzo at version 3.8 with Ecrix tape drives...it lost a catalog and had to recontruct the database of the files on the tape...the recontruct process took a whole week with the computer working on it 24 hours a day. (on a g4/500, ultrawide, lvd, scsi). Since then I've been using Retrospect. (a rebuild of the catalog takes maybe a few hours instead of days). As much as I liked the features that Mezzo offered, they don't seem to have a big enough staff to design or support a program that does a critical task like backing up data. Retrospect is used by millions of people...they backup data reliably.

[David Cole]

Unfortunately, I have to agree: I just can't rely on Mezzo at this point. I've been very patient, watching the upgrades, faithfully downloading and re-importing my catalogs, converting tapes... only to have the program be buggy and crash. Numerous e-mails to Mezzo have made little difference. This forum is what I've been looking for: an honest assessment of a product that is great on paper but falls short in practice. I'm hoping that Mezzo will one day warrant my support but I have to say, I'm back to Retrospect.

-DC

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[Will Russell]

I've been using Retrospect with AIT for several years. Never any problems caused by Retrospect, no data loss, etc. Had one conflict with a driver update but the tech support folks fixed it on the phone for me in 30 sec.