Restrospect

What mistakes were those? Failure to license hardware/software? Failure to negotiate cross-company collaboration (ie, the late coming of Office to Mac)? In retrospect, I think some of the "mistakes" Apple was perceived of making in the past weren't actually mistakes in the long run. Licensing Apple hardware and software to companies like UMAX worked (or didn't work,...

we were using a back up program called retrospect for scheduled backups of selected folders from all machines which would back up to the imac. ...

Well, in retrospect it looks as though the "modder" was foretelling the future. ...

Carbon Copy Cloner which is free, or SuperDuper which is not, either will do a bang up job of cloning your OS X system, and it will be bootable. Keep in mind that cloning to another drive takes over the whole drive or partition, so this action will delete any existing data on the target drive or partition. SuperDuper is my personal favorite, the almost instant replies to...

It came loaded with Retrospect Express which I am not very happy with. ...

Sorry if I'm being dense. Can conventional backup software like Retrospect or SilverKeeper really be used to back two different laptops that are both getting changed onto one backup version of a file system? ...

It would with the configuration I described. Have you thought about SilverKeeper: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10097 You could get an external hard drive as your backup and it would feed both computers the latest data.

Sadly you will need a server will roaming accounts for what you are exactly want. The closet Sync files that act like Apple's .Mac is BusySync. Also you get something like Time Capsule or get something like a Drobo with a Dobo Share and an Airport Extreme. Then share files with this kind of setup.

Retrospect wouldn't keep the two laptops with identical files. I need to be able to use either interchangeably. The air's sadly all run Leopard, which I'm not impressed by. I have paid for the upgrade to my other laptop and can make it if I have to. Joanna

Have you thought about getting a server so neither laptop has to manage all that data? You just use retrospect to back everything up; it compares all worked on files to the server files and copies over only what's changed.