Some of you may not realize that Retrospect started out as a Mac backup application.
Retrospect for Mac was first released in 1989 as standalone backup software for professional users. Because Macs were so easy to network, even in the early days of the platform, network clients/agents were added soon thereafter. It quickly became commonplace for every Mac in a workgroup to be backed up across the network to an external SCSI tape drive. And we saw blazing fast speeds over LocalTalk...just over 1 MB/min!
During that time, Retrospect matured, supporting more devices and benefiting from faster networking protocols. Retrospect became the de facto standard for Mac backup, even at large organizations like Motorola, NASA, Nortel, and others that each had thousands of Macs.
Then, in the '90s, with the onslaught of improved versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac use in large corporate environments began to decline significantly. Dantz (the company that created Retrospect) saw this decline as a significant threat to the company's survival, and work was started on the Windows version of Retrospect.
Unfortunately, this also marked the time that Mac development slowed down significantly. As a result, the Mac version of Retrospect in use today has not come very far from what it was a decade ago. While Retrospect for Mac is still hugely reliable when it comes to performing restores, it still has old code that doesn't run natively on Intel Macs, and it can't run multiple backup/restore operations simultaneously.
That Retrospect for the Mac hasn’t kept up with the times disappoints not just our users, but our dev team, as well. It's long overdue that we rectify the situation.
Now that Retrospect 7.6 for Windows has shipped (with added Mozy online backup integration, improved support for Windows Server 2008 and Vista, and a few other changes), we are turning our attention fully to the development of Retrospect X for Mac OS X.
We're working hard to get Retrospect X out the door and we'll be making beta test releases available in Q4 of this year. While we've got our work cut out for us, we're up to the challenge of bringing you the Retrospect you want and deserve. We look forward to your feedback as we make this happen and we'll be using this forum to talk about what we're working on and to share sneak previews of what is to come.
Stay tuned!