Retrospective on Backup

Under the hood in Retrospect 7.7

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

Snags with Windows 7 + 7.7

One of the big features of Retrospect 7.7 is our new Disaster Recovery CD. This uses Microsoft Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) and is a far simpler turn-key solution. No more do you need to create a custom CD for each computer that needs to be restored.

Unfortunately, we've hit a snag with Windows 7. One of the new features Microsoft is introducing, Startup Repair, creates a hidden partition that your system can boot from to trouble-shoot startup issues. (See this page for more details.) This hidden partition is created auto-magically for you if you let Windows do the formatting.

The snag comes in when you are doing a bare metal style recovery where the whole drive dies and you need to do the formatting and partitioning inside of WinPE. If this partition is not re-created by Windows 7, then your system fails to boot. Kind of a blow for our new solution, eh?

The good news is that we are working with Microsoft and have high hopes that we can develop a complete disaster recovery solution for Windows 7 soon.

JG

Snow Leopard support delayed a few weeks

Just a quick update on the Mac version. Retrospect 8 was due for a minor update this week that adds support for Snow Leopard and eight more languages. We've run into a few issues that require some additional work, and we're now expecting to have this minor update ready in a couple of weeks, around the second full week of October. This will be a free update.

Update on Windows development

Though it may appear at first glance that all of our attention is being spent on Retrospect 8 for the Mac, we are concurrently developing Retrospect 7.7 for Windows.

Retrospect 7.7 will use the new universal Retrospect engine that was developed simultaneously for Windows and Mac, but it will continue to have the familiar Retrospect 7.6 user interface. (An updated user interface and separate management console will be provided as part of a later release.)

Version 7.7 will be the first Retrospect release available as a 64-bit application, which will allow Retrospect to overcome existing 32-bit memory addressing limitations. This release will also add official support for Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, as well as new functionality in two critical areas: VMware integration and Disaster Recovery.

New VMware integration will employ pre and post scripts to initiate a VCB snapshot of any running VM and allow Retrospect to back up either the guest OS file system or the VM image files while the VM is in a quiesced state. This provides two methods to back up running guest OSes that Retrospect does not have today.

For version 7.7, Retrospect's existing Disaster Recovery technology will be supplemented with a Microsoft Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) boot technology. The WinPE technology method will be used for all XP/2003 and later OSes. Instead of requiring the Retrospect administrator to create a custom boot CD for each computer they wish to be able to recover from bare metal, the WinPE method will allow for a single, generic boot disc to provide bare metal recovery for any computer supported by WinPE.

Future blog entries will detail each of these new capabilities.

Update on Mac development

It has been far too long since our last update. It seems that when we get busy, the blog is the first to suffer. Hopefully, this will get better in the future.

So what's going on with the Retrospect development team?

We've been fixing bugs and working on localized language support. French and German are complete, and they'll ship early next week as part of an update to Retrospect 8.1 that will include more than 100 bug fixes.

After that, our next Mac release is scheduled for the end of the month. It will include support for Snow Leopard (restoring compressed files, fixes for UI issues, a package-based Mac Retrospect Client installer) and language support for Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. For many of these languages, this release will represent the first time that Retrospect for Mac is localized.

We have a third Mac release planned for later in the year. This release will have some new features that we're not quite ready to talk about yet, but one important addition will be a 64-bit version of Retrospect 8. This is particularly important because moving to 64-bit will allow Retrospect to address more than 4 GB of RAM, which will result in our being able to back up more files from a single volume.

This is a lot to do, and we'll have a Windows release in this timeframe, as well (which will be detailed in an upcoming post).

Retrospect 8 users: Watch for auto update notification early next week.

-Eric

Sneak preview: Operations Log

Retrospect 8.1 is coming soon and I wanted to show you folk a sneak preview of one of the areas we've enhanced: the operations log.

The log in 8.0 was...functional, but there is not much to say after that. The new 8.1 log brings back the look and feel of the existing logs with icons and formatting:

And yes, the famous > for errors is also back.

We've also zipped up the find mechanism, Safari style:

Note that multiple matches all highlight - the current match is in gold, the others are white. Aside from the standard shortcuts (Command+G or Enter for next and Shift+Command+G or Shift+Enter for previous), we have also added wildcard and regular expression searching (in a single line of text).

Hope you are liking it!
JG

Retrospect 8.0 has shipped...

...and we're already hard at work on UI improvements, PowerPC support, and adding functionality. We have several Mac updates planned for this year, and we also have plans for the Windows version. My perfect world would have both the Mac and Windows versions of Retrospect in parity. I think that's a fine goal.

Stay tuned for reports of specific improvements on the way, but right now, the dev team is taking a much-needed rest. (I figure that will last about an hour... ;-))

-Eric

Search for Files Restore back

We haven't forgotten we owe you the second part of the scheduling UI walkthrough, but we are taking a brief break to cover a missing feature that has been added recently. Many of you have asked "What happened to Find Files restore?" This feature allows you to search across multiple media sets without the need to know the location of the file. Beta 5, now available at http://www.retrospect.com/products/software/retrospect8/publicbeta, adds this feature back into the product.

To restore using this feature, first launch the restore assistant:

The assistant's default is to restore files selected from a single point in time, but the third option allows you to search across all backups, even in multiple media sets.

Selecting "Continue" allows you to choose what media sets to look in and also what to search for. You can build complicated searches or, as in the example below, just look for part of a file's name.

Selecting "Continue" again prompts you for where you want to restore the files. The default is to create a new folder in the selected volume.

Selecting "Continue" causes Retrospect to start searching through all the media sets you selected, across every backup it knows about, and will display each media set that found a match. As you can imagine, this can take a while! Click "Preview" to see the files Retrospect has found and to choose the files you want to restore.

Here, we are only seeing one drive, "4G", that had any matching files. If multiple drives backed up to "Media Set A" had those files, they would show up in this tree as well. If the file has been backed up multiple times, you would see a different entry for each time it changed, with the modified date reflecting the date.

The final pane is the standard summary you see in the other assistant work flows. Selecting "Start Now" will begin the restore.

Hope you folk enjoyed the walk through and are also checking out the beta. Keep those comments coming!

Walkthrough of the new Scheduling UI

One of the areas we are looking to improve with the new UI is scheduling scripts. First time users are baffled and even long-time users are frequently amazed at finding some existing feature. Below, we will go through some screenshots to show off the new design. If you've downloaded the beta at http://www.retrospect.com/products/software/retrospect8/publicbeta, you can play along at home.

The following is the schedule tab for a newly created script:

 

Not much to do or see here except click the "+" icon. Doing that gives you the default schedule below:

The default schedule is to back up every week, Monday through Friday, starting at 10:00 PM. For backup scripts, you can choose the Media Set this schedule will go to via the Destination menu. Hopefully, it is pretty obvious that you can set the first start date via the calendar and the time each backup will occur by typing in the start field.

Clicking the menu next to the repeat label gives you the following options:

Never is useful for scheduling one-off actions, like doing a catch-up backup at the end of day. Hourly and daily allow you to schedule repeating backups, to occur every six hours for example, or every two days. This last option allows you to set up a rotating backup to back up to alternating media every day, as seen in the next screenshot.

The last repeat type, monthly, comes in handy where you may want to back up to an off-site media or take advantage of Retrospect's media actions to create a new Media Set before backing up or to recycle (overwrite) an existing Media Set.

The above screenshot shows the other media actions. "No media action" was formerly called "Normal" but that term confused too many novice users. This tells Retrospect to follow its default behavior: Start fresh if the Media Set is empty, otherwise append data to the media. Let us know if you like the new terminology. The menu next to "month(s)" allows you to pick other options like "on the second Saturday" or "on the last Saturday."

Finally, let's go back to the "weekly" repeat type and look at the last option:

 

For schedules that repeat on fixed days of the week, while we default to the normal approach of running the backup until it is complete, we also expose a feature that was formerly hidden in Script Options, the ability to stop a script at a fixed time. This is useful for making sure backups stop before the normal work-day begins. This ability to set backup windows is at the heart of Proactive Backup (Backup Server scripts in 6.1) and we will talk more about the scheduling interface for those scripts in our next post.

-JG

Retrospect at Macworld Expo

Well be there, but we're going to be a little harder to find at Macworld Expo this year.

As you probably know, EMC purchased Iomega in 2008, and together with EMC's SOHO network storage management software development team, we're all part of EMC's Consumer and Small Business Products Division. That means one budget for Macworld Expo, and the booth will be branded as Iomega. This also means that you won't see "Retrospect" mentioned in the show guide.

You will find Iomega's booth in the North Hall, #4015. That's where we'll be showing EMC Retrospect, along with some really cool storage devices from Iomega.

Hope to see you there!

-Eric