Hi folk,
Sorry for the delays in responding to some of the great commentary on the last post. As you have seen, we've finally released Retrospect 7.7 (See our main site at http://www.retrospect.com/ for details). I'd like to spend some time today going over the changes under the hood and how that affected some of our decisions and why you see what you see in 7.7.
Retrospect 7.7 is a transition step between 7.6 and 8.0 in that it has the same cross-platform engine that ships with Retrospect 8.0 on the Mac, but with the older 7.6 UI. There were a lot of reasons for going with this approach. In the comments to the last post, there were folk urging us to get 7.7 out the door as soon as possible and others unhappy it wasn't going to be the full-blown new User Interface as the Mac product got. Given the resources we have today, not putting a brand-new UI saved us a lot of time, both in development and testing. At the same time, the new engine offers a lot of under-the-hood improvements, not least is the ability to run native on 64-bit machines.
There is definitely some pain involved with going with the new world order. As an example, the new engine uses the current standard of file paths on the Mac, so upgrading from 7.6 to 7.7 will cause us to want to back up Mac OS X clients from scratch. This won't affect future backups and the file path system will allow us to do hopefully cooler things in the future.
For more specific information, check out our forums at: http://forums.dantz.com/
JG
