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

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.

Testing a fix for Mac clients turning themselves off

Just a quick note to let folks know that we've been testing a fix for our #1 bug, where Mac Retrospect Clients turn themselves off for no apparent reason, and we hope to make new client and app builds available in the next few days.

-Eric