New Retrospect X screenshots!

After being out of the office at Apple's Sales Engineer Fall Camp up in Tahoe City on Wednesday and Thursday, I didn't have time to get the new screenshots up yesterday, so here they are (click any screenshot to see a full-size version)...

Dashboard/Reports
This is the main dashboard view showing a single Retrospect server in the left-nav. Retrospect is showing the four reports that I saved from various other views. Reports are like smart folders; you can save a set of rules for each one. Clicking the Edit button on the right side of each report's title bar takes you to the corresponding view where you can make changes to the criteria you've set.

You will notice that several of the reports have green check marks in their leftmost column. These are placeholders for a variety of status icons that will be added in a future build. Status icons will allow a user to tell at-a-glance if an activity is running, has generated an error or warning, etc.

Adding Clients
Neither Retrospect 6.1 for Mac nor 7.6 for Windows do a very good job today of dealing with long lists of network clients. They only provide alphabetical sorting, and they don't really provide any information other than client name and computing platform. As you can see in this screenshot, Retrospect X will not only show a variety of information for each client computer, but the view can be sorted by any column. Here, we're sorting by computing platform as an example.

New to the Mac with Retrospect X is the ability to define multiple network interfaces, so you could have, say, one set up for either side of a firewall, or you could keep backup traffic from crossing subnets.

You'll also likely notice that apostrophes aren't yet displaying properly. That's because we're still making significant changes to the UI and engine, but we'll soon begin the work of fine-tuning and refining.

Tagging Sources
The Sources view shows all local volumes, client computers and their volumes, as well as network-attached storage devices or volumes accessed through some file sharing protocol (instead of the Retrospect Client software). Also visible in this view are favorite folders defined by the administrator, which replace Retrospect's "subvolume" moniker. Again, this is a fairly rough view, but there are several key things to point out...

At the very top of the Sources list are several scope buttons: Servers, Desktops & Laptops, Local, Client, and Shares. Clicking these buttons will cause the Sources list to be filtered according to the type of operating system installed on a source's host computer, or according to how the Retrospect server is connecting to that source.

Below the scope buttons are sortable columns, with only a portion of the available columns shown. By control/right-clicking on any column heading, users can turn the available headings on or off to customize the view as needed.

Below the Sources list, in the Options pane, you can see that we've assigned two tags to Robin's MacBook: Building2 and Critical Systems. Tags replace the Source Groups container in previous editions of Retrospect. Source Groups were essentially folders containing aliases/shortcuts to whichever sources/volumes the user assigned. They provided a level of abstraction and an ability to logically group sources for backups. For example, one might have a Notebooks Source Group that contained aliases to all the laptop computers they were backing up with Retrospect, and then they would just point their backup script at the Notebooks Source Group. With Retrospect X, tags provide a more flexible and easily recognizable method for doing the same thing.

Scheduling a Script
This screenshot shows the interface for scheduling a script, the Daily Backup script in this case. Just as with previous versions of Retrospect, scripts can contain multiple schedules and target multiple destination media sets, so you only need a single script for each group of sources to which you want the same schedule to apply

To add a schedule, one simply clicks the + button in the Schedule pane and selects the various options in the Details pane below. Here, our backup will be targeting Test Set A as its destination media set, and no special media action will be performed. Media actions tell Retrospect what to prior to starting the actual backup. "No media action" (like "normal" today) means that Retrospect will start writing to empty media if no backup has yet been performed to the chosen media set, or, if data is already contained in the destination media set, then Retrospect will append to the existing media. Retrospect can also be told to skip to new media, recycle/erase existing media, or to archive the existing media set and start a new one.

Retrospect X gets a calendar that makes it easier to select a script's start date, and it also gains a stop time option, where the administrator can force Retrospect X to stop backing up at a certain time.

I hope that everyone finds these new screenshots and accompanying text helpful as far as seeing where we are with Retrospect X. We certainly appreciate your feedback here on the blog, and we invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section.

The real test will be getting a beta in your hands, which we're working towards as hard as we can. Thanks for reading—I'll post another update soon.

-Eric