For years after the release of Retrospect 6, we Mac users were waiting for the new version. Originally anticipated to be Retrospect 7 and/or Retrospect X, we read about the trials and tribulations of the EMC acquisition and reorganizations, hoping and praying that the Mac version of the Retrospect wouldn't be canned altogether. The Windows world got that much more ahead on the backup game, with offsite capabilities, backup pruning, government-level encryption, and transport compression becoming common features in all backup software.

Then, a funny thing happened: Mac users just gave up on hoping for a new version. We used alternatives like Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, and BRU to try to fill in where Retrospect fell flat – frequently Frankensteining backup systems to get 100% reliability. We learned to live with Retrospect's OS 9 legacy interface quirks and just bit the bullet and checked backups frequently and meticulously to get them working right.

So when Retrospect 8 finally was released earlier this year, I took my time getting to it. Not because I didn't need it, but simply because I was too busy checking all of my client's Retrospect 6 logs and reports via ARD to get around to it. EMC had simply beat my enthusiasm for what used to be a great product out of me.

That enthusiasm is back. Not because Retrospect 8 is perfect – there are a lot of little problems that remain. But EMC's Mac team has taken a step back, rewritten the whole damn thing from the ground up, and has brought Retrospect 8 back to the top of the pyramid.

The days of yore

[Seriously, I mean yore, Retrospect 6 came out in 2004...]

For those that haven't used Retrospect 6 in a while, let me remind you how Dantz originally got to the top of the backup pyramid in the Mac world: the user interface.

Innovative at the time, it provided a much cleaner and clearer interface for managing backups on small networks and simple servers - and that alone put it far above the rest.

As Retrospect grew older, however, it showed its age. In particular, as server software, file systems, and storage systems became more complex, Retrospect 6 simply couldn't keep up. Large backups took forever, especially when scanning the 6 million files that are resident on modern servers. Even worse, it couldn't do more than one backup at once, even if your disk throughput could handle it.

Retrospect also had a nasty tendency to remap source folders periodically - just often enough to cause real problems with your files not being backed up, but no often enough that you'd be looking for it. The image to the right shows how a backup of a primary hard drive would turn into a backup of an obscure folder.

The architecture

Under the hood, Retrospect 8 has been completed retooled, and you see the changes from the first moment that you try to install it. No longer a Server application and Client on the machines that you want to backup remotely, it has three components: the Engine, the Console, and Clients.

The Engine is like the "server" application of yore. It handles the actual backup functionality on the machine performing the backups – and installed on its own, allows you to backup all local volumes to direct attached hard drives, tape, or removable media systems. Tape library support depends on the version purchased, apparently, but I didn't get a chance to try it out with all kinds of tape drives and libraries.

However, when you install the Engine, you see nothing like the old Retrospect application – there's no actual application or interface. It's a bit disconcerting.


For all of that, you need to install the Console. For those of you running Retrospect on a single machine, you'll be annoyed by the fact that you have to install both installers just to get what you used to get for Retrospect 6, but for those of us with headless servers in the closet, this change is a revelation (although users of BRU and other Window backup apps will be suitably unimpressed). The concept of a separate Console application means that you can see and control all of the Retrospect functions on another machine without having to use Remote Desktop to view the backup server. With the right network port mapping, you can even administer your backup server 100% remotely – including selecting local volumes and folders – just by installing the Console application on your remote machine.

I can't stress how important this is for serious service providers or for an organization with multiple backup servers distributed through many geographic locations. Every week, I send out almost 20 backup reports for our Managed Services clients. That means that I have to ARD to every single Retrospect machine to check the backup status and make adjustments, which is not only a pain to do, but incredibly hard to arrange in the first place.

Now, with Retrospect 8, I can run the application from my desktop and set it to check in on multiple engines on a single console application. Not only is that a time saver, but a data saver, because the more noise that I have to sift through to put together a client's backup report, the more likely I will be to make a mistake which will result in a backup not happening.

Another massive improvement is that the server doesn't have to be logged in and Retrospect doesn't have to be launched in order to run. Since the engine runs as a common background process in OS X, it runs seamlessly - and automated script execution has been incredibly reliable, especially compared to Retrospect 6, which seemed to have a 10% failure rate depending on a lot of external factors, including the phase of the moon.

Multiple concurrent backups is also possible, great for providers like us, who run multiple offsite backups to our data centers using Retrospect. So you could run 3 clients each with 2 Mbps upload speeds simultaneously to a server which had 6 Mbps download speeds, all from one machine.

You can even control individual backup streams separately. Each one can be paused, stopped, or restarted independently of the others. In one instance, I paused one backup (out of three) mid-stream for 8 hours to allow for peak hours to pass, then started it right back up again. Of course, it was only backing up files that Retrospect had found 8 hours before, but that's flexibility that Retrospect 6 simply couldn't give you.

Compatibility

Before I talk about the interface, let me make sure to make a few things clear about compatibility. It's really, really important to know some of these little bits before you go out and buy the upgrade.

First off, you're currently limited to using new storage sets (now called Media Sets) - you can't migrate Retrospect 6 catalogs or disk backup sets for use in Retrospect 8. For some people, that's not a big deal since you can overwrite tape and hard drive media, but for others (like us), we need to retain information from previous backups, so that's a waste of valuable space. EMC says that this will be addressed in a future upgrade, but that's a little late for us.

One good thing is that you can run both Retrospect 6 and 8 simultaneously. Other than possible device contention issues, this works well, which means that you can easily have access to older backups in the older Retrospect 6 backup set format without too much trouble. We're currently running one server with 5 scripts still running on Retrospect 6 and two on Retrospect 8 - it works without any issues.

Clients work the same in Retrospect 8 as they did in Retrospect 6. While it comes with a new version of the Mac client (6.3.019), that client is compatible with both Retrospect 8 and 6 servers. I didn't test if previous versions of the client are compatible with the Retrospect 8 engine, but even if they did that's a very bad idea – always run the latest client with the latest engine. As far as we could tell, there was no real enhancements of functionality on the client side - it's still an application which turns on a background process which waits for the Engine to contact it, and there are no additional options like auto-startup or unsleep for a nightly backup when the machine is turned off.

The Interface

Of course, biggest change is the new interface. Retrospect has always been known as the backup software that anyone could use (or mess up for that matter, since all of the functions were easily accessible) so they risked a lot by doing a complete rewrite of the interface. Still, the old interface needed help - it opened a lot of windows (a la OS 9) and ultimately confused you if you had a lot of backup scripts.

The new interface consolidates everything under a now-traditional UI similar in concept to OS X Mail. You have the basic functions on the left: Scripts, Media Sets, Reports, etc; then a pane on the right which shows you an overview and a pane on the bottom right which shows you the details. It's an interface concept that we all know and love through other apps, and it works well for Retrospect.

Like any major change of UI, it takes getting used to. All of the options are generally the same, just located in a different place. For new users, it will make sense pretty much off the bat, and it allows you to set up a backup without opening lots of confusing little windows.

Once you load the console, the first thing that you have to do is to add a server. Unfortunately, unlike many of Apple's tools, EMC doesn't seem to leverage Bonjour for autodiscovery - you still have to type in the IP (or localhost) of the Engine and a password.

Strangely, upon initial installation, the Engine doesn't ask for a password, so it's very easy to install a Retrospect server which is available to anyone on the network with the Console application - and worse yet to the entire world if you're on a machine available to the outside. So, my best tip: set a password the first time you log in to a new Engine before doing anything.

As mentioned, when running the console remotely, you can do everything that you could on the machine itself, including selecting "local" drives and folders as backup sources or destinations. Initial versions were slow to do things like browse folder hierarchy, but that's been improved in more recent versions (8.1.148 was the one we tested). Still, some functions, like showing a subset of all reports, still seem slower than they should be, given what information is coming from the server.

There are also a few interface issues that remain even in the latest version. For instance, you can add new folders through the file browser, but when you do so, the hierarchy that you've navigated gets reset - so it's annoying to have to find that folder again that you just created. And there's one that I have a real problem with: deleting an entire volume (any volume on the Engine machine) is just two mouse clicks away. Combine that with the lack of a password on the Engine at install and you have some real dangerous possibilities with untrained users.

Also, if you end up removing a disk from your sources list and want to add it back, sometimes the console needs to be quit and restarted in order to see your source. Annoying.

Sometimes deleting scripts doesn't work (I've had one that I just can't get rid of) and other changes in folders to backup have required me to restart the console application. Luckily, unlike the previous version, doing so doesn't interrupt ongoing backups.

However, many of those problems are just a revision away from being non-issues. Much of what has changed has been for the better.

For instance, the very confusing "Weekly Schedule" function in Retrospect 6 has been simplified - with a single option to set a "stop time" for a script that's running. Honestly, that's all I've ever used the schedule preferences for - to stop an automatic backup before it causes disruption to users.

Other little annoyances have been dealt with as well. In Retrospect 6, if you had an encrypted storage set, you'd find yourself typing in the encryption key all the time, even to get automated backups to work. In 8, the developers have fixed that, allowing you to essentially save the password for either automatic or manual backups - you have the choice.

Email notification of errors or successful backups are no longer a separate and unreliable Apple Script. Now, email notification is built into the Retrospect core software - and it works well. There are options to just get errors or status on all backups. Nice.

In the end - the improvements far outweigh the need for improvement. Retrospect 8 has fixed a lot of the interface errors and inefficiencies of its predecessor - and for that it deserves a pat on the back.

Backup Functions

Now on to the important stuff. Backing up your data. While we can't say that we've had to restore entire server drives off of weeks of incremental backups, so far what testing we have done shows that Retrospect does what it's supposed to do. It backs up data and allows you to recover it. Easily.

The reporting capability has advanced significantly as well, allowing you to see backup status for upcoming and past events, narrow down the logs to those events, and even set up "smart reports" which can give you a snapshot of certain events that match various criteria - such as backup sources which haven't been backed up in the last 7 days or failed backups from the last few days.

The main problem with these is simply the vast amount of choice. Before, Retrospect 6 admins looked at the (only) two reports - the log and the backup report which showed when the last backup was done for various clients. It's wasn't very deep, and you certainly couldn't cut the data in multiple ways, but it did the job. Now, I find myself confused by the reporting interface.

Part of the confusion is that creating a report isn't exactly intuitive. While you can create a report from any list view (of sources, scripts, etc) by hitting the "save report" button, there's no basic "add report" button - so you're stuck trying to find something that closely matches first, then customizing from there. It would make more sense to have "Reports" as an option if you hid the giant "add" button and then select from a subset of standard reports (e.g. sources, scripts, etc).

However, once you get your reports set up right, the interface makes sense. If you're looking at an activity (i.e. a failed, current, or successful backup run), status bars are longer, giving you better progress when running massive backups. You can also click on the well-placed "Log" tab and see the log associated with that specific backup run. No longer do we have to hunt through a giant log file just to see if last Thursday's backup had errors. Phew.

Gripes... Little Ones

It's obvious that all of the changes to Retrospect 8 have been months (years?) of work for the EMC Retrospect team and I applaud them for taking the time to completely rethink backup on the Mac. Their hard work has some real results, and Retrospect is back as a real contender for small businesses' and larger Mac departments' (even mixed platform) backup needs.

Still, as any annoying consumer would, I have my list of improvements:

• Better performance of the console with remote servers
• Fix annoying UI glitches (like the folder hierarchy reset mentioned above)
• Better interface for creating reports
• Add client-side compression of files to reduce bandwidth for remote backups
• Enable backup rules to be exported and imported, especially now that I have easy access to multiple servers from one console
• Enable 'Proactive Backups' to be able to choose alternating Media Sets from week to week
• Keep improving the stability of the Console app (I've had 3 crashes so far)

Starting at $129 for the desktop version ($249 for 3 clients in addition), or $479 for a single server version ($609 with 20 clients), it's definitely priced to be outside of the "home user" Time Machine or Superduper backup. For a business, though, where backups are more than just a hard drive to hard drive copy and are the lifeblood of any disaster recovery plan, Retrospect 8 is a fully capable and flexible backup system.

It still has many, many quirks for sure, but in my opinion, it's one of the easiest to use - yet powerful - backup programs out there for any platform.