Retrospect recently announced new versions of its Backup (17) and Virtual (2020) products. I had the opportunity to speak to JG Heithcock (GM, Retrospect) about the announcement and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

What’s New?

Retrospect Backup 17 has the following new features:

• Automatic Onboarding: Simplified and automated deployment and discovery;
• Nexsan E-Series / Unity Certification;
• 10x Faster ProactiveAI; and
• Restore Preflight for restores from cold storage.

Retrospect Virtual 2020 has the following enhancements:

• Automatic Onboarding: Physical and Virtual monitoring from a single website;
• 50% Faster;
• Wasabi Cloud Support;
• Backblaze B2 Cloud Support; and
• Flexible licensing between VMware and Hyper-V.

Automatic Onboarding?

So what exactly is automatic onboarding? You can onboard new servers and endpoints for faster deployment and automatic discovery.

• Share one link with your team. No agent password required.
• Retrospect Backup finds and protects new clients with ProactiveAI.
• Add servers, desktops, and laptops to Retrospect Backup.
• Single pane of glass for entire backup infrastructure with Retrospect Management Console.
• Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

You can also onboard a new Retrospect Backup server for faster, simplified deployment.

• Protect group or site.
• Customised installer with license built-in.
• Seamless Management Console integration.
• Available for Windows and Mac.

Onboard new Retrospect Virtual server for complete physical and virtual monitoring.

• Customised installer
• Seamless Management Console integration.
• Monitor Physical + Virtual

Pricing

There’s a variety of pricing available. When you buy a perpetual license, you have access to any new minor or major version upgrades for 12 months. With the monthly subscription model you have access to the latest version of the product for as long as you keep the subscription active.

[image courtesy of Retrospect]

Thoughts And Further Reading

Retrospect was acquired by StorCentric in June 2019 after bouncing around a few different owners over the years. It’s been around for a long time, and has a rich history of delivering data protection solutions for small business and “prosumer” markets. I have reasonably fond memories of Retrospect from the time when it was shipped with Maxtor OneTouch external hard drives. Platform support is robust, with protection options available across Windows, macOS and some Linux, and the pricing is competitive. Retrospect is also benefitting from joining the StorCentric family, and I’m looking forward to hearing about more product integrations as time goes on.

Why would I cover a data protection product that isn’t squarely targeted at the enterprise or cloud market? Because I’m interested in data protection solutions across all areas of IT. I think the small business and home market is particularly under-represented when it comes to easy to deploy and run solutions. There is a growing market for cloud-based solutions, but simple local protection options still seem to be pretty rare. The number of people I talk to who are just manually copying data from one spot to another is pretty crazy. Why is it so hard to get good backup and recovery happening on endpoints? It shouldn’t be. You could argue that, with the advent of SaaS services and cloud-based storage solutions, the requirement to protect endpoints the way we used to has changed. But local protection options still makes it a whole lot quicker and easier to recover.

If you’re in the market for a solution that is relatively simple to operate, has solid support for endpoint operating systems and workloads, and is competitively priced, then I think Retrospect is worth evaluating. You can read the announcement here.