Retrospective on Backup

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