Retrospective on Backup

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!