It’s official. Retrospect 8 is now available for purchase and upgrade at the EMC Insignia site (or at 318 of course). Two quick features that really jump out at me as immediate reasons to upgrade: grooming and enhanced GUI. Now, I’m a command line guy, so for me to say enhanced GUI usually means there’s some kind of a productivity gain out the GUI. When I tap in and check backups, I usually also check available disk space, which Retrospect 8 shows you saving a quick check of the file system. It also displays the disks color coded to let you know if you’re almost out of disk space. Some people already check it, not all though…
The front end application has also been separated from the backend app, allowing you to open Retrospect from another Mac and control the daemon running on the server. This is a long overdue enhancement IMHO, although not a compelling reason on its own for most to upgrade.
There are other features as well. For example, there are new email alerts, to help reduce the recurring time to check Retrospect. You can also backup open files on Windows clients with the Add-on for doing so. There is also better bar code tracking in tape libraries and my cleaning tape script worked, which is nice (and new). The other big enhancements are grooming, which I covered here and utility scripts, which I covered here.
Oh and it’s a little more stable. The RetroRun issues I have been seeing with 6.* seem to have been fixed on my test machines… Overall it’s a great upgrade, hasn’t been out long so I’m sure more will come over the next few weeks on it as I further kick the tires!
