NetWorker’s little brother gets a pair of long pants

OK, NetWorker and Retrospect are sort of only related by virtue of the fact that they’re both owned by the same parent company, EMC.

However, I’ve been a fan of Retrospect for years, having done quite a lot of sysadmin style work on the side for a particular graphic design house. I think it’s probably the most underrated workgroup level backup product on the market. Certainly on the Macintosh side, it did somewhat seem to suffer following the acquisition by EMC*, and it’s been a long wait for a comprehensive update.

So, it’s good to see that Retrospect 8 for the Macintosh has been released. There’s reasonably good coverage to be found at TidBits, with official information to be found at the EMC/Dantz Retrospect for Mac product page.

Is Retrospect enterprise ready? Heck no – but that’s no bad reflection on the product either; I like workgroup backup products that don’t pretend to be enterprise products. It’s usually tricky, and it usually ends in tears.

Long term I’d like to see better NetWorker/Retrospect integration – for instance, it would be an excellent stepping stone for companies if they could covert a Retrospect server, regardless of platform, into a NetWorker “readonly” storage node – i.e., integrate so that new backups are done with NetWorker once a company reaches a certain size, but legacy backups remain, and can be recovered from within NetWorker.


* Historically, it had already appeared that the Macintosh version of Retrospect had been suffering under the old Dantz management though – it was certainly lagging behind the Windows version of the product by the time EMC purchased Dantz.

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