EMC® Retrospect® for Macintosh is designed to deliver automated, reliable, cost-effective protection for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Retrospect has won numerous awards and broad industry acclaim by addressing the unique challenges faced by SMBs in these critical areas:

• Protects servers, desktops, and notebooks
• Easy to manage, self-adjusting
• Fast backups and Smart Restores™ with unparalleled accuracy
• Backup to disk, tape, or CD/DVD
• Simplified media management
• Bare Metal Restores
  

Award-winning software
EMC Retrospect backup and recovery software is designed to deliver automated and reliable protection for the small and medium business (SMB) and the distributed enterprise. Businesses choose to protect their data assets with Retrospect for its ease of use, fast backups, smart restores, and simplified media management.

For more than two decades, EMC Retrospect software has protected thousands of businesses and millions of computers across the globe from data loss and system failure. Retrospect has won numerous awards and broad industry acclaim for its ease of use, reliability, accuracy, and speed.

Retrospect for Macintosh runs on a Macintosh backup computer and protects networked servers, desktops, and notebooks running the latest Macintosh operating systems including Mac OS X Tiger, as well as desktops and notebooks running Windows and Red Hat Linux.

The EasyScript wizard, intuitive graphical user interface, and automatic backup device recognition make it easy to set up backups that run automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule, and during a specific time frame. Retrospect's self-adjusting operations further ensure computers are never starved of protection. Servers, desktops, and notebooks are recognized when they connect to the network and re-prioritized if they were unavailable or could not be backed up within a previous time period. Backups can also be set on a fixed schedule. To prevent wasting media and time, filters allow administrators to exclude a variety of information during backups, including music and movies.

Fast, reliable, secure backups
Retrospect's patented Progressive Backup technology accelerates backups and reduces storage costs by copying only new or changed data since the previous backup. Retrospect recognizes identical files that reside on multiple desktops and laptops and backs up just one copy. Data compression further minimizes backup storage consumption. Retrospect verifies all backup content, not just file name and size, to avoid costly surprises. To protect against unauthorized access, Retrospect provides fast SimpleCrypt'" or strong DES data encryption on the backup media.

Smart Restores™
Retrospect's patented technology enables fast, reliable restores of individual files, directories, or entire file systems with unparalleled accuracy. Retrospect compiles a complete list of files and folders prior to each client backup. Retrospect references the appropriate list and restores only the exact data necessary to return the computer to a particular point in time. Other software applications restore an entire full backup and overlay subsequent incremental backups, resulting in lengthy recovery times and unwanted files that were previously deleted, renamed, or moved. With Retrospect, you recover only data that's needed, eliminating confusion and potential mistakes.

Backup to disk, tape or CD/DVD
Retrospect provides the flexibility to leverage disk, tape, or CD/DVD devices to optimize backup and recovery performance, cost efficiency, and restore capabilities. To guard against media failure or disaster, Retrospect makes it easy to create and manage multiple sets of backup data. Retrospect also uses a quick incremental backup to update tapes brought on-site, avoiding the need for new full backups and simplifying media rotation policies.

Bare metal restore
Retrospect delivers fast, efficient bare metal restore capabilities for your Macintosh computers. During the course of performing backups, Retrospect gathers all necessary information to completely restore a computer, even if it has become unresponsive. Use the Retrospect product CD to start the computer and activate Retrospect. Then restore the operating system, applications, application settings, data, and user preferences. Retrospect saves countless hours of software installation, system configuration, and downtime costs. Whether you need to recover a file or folder, take a computer back to a prior point in time, or restore a computer that has failed completely. Retrospect has you covered.

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How Retrospect works

Retrospect uses an archival method of backup that ensures backed up files are not deleted or written over until you request it. That way they stay on the disk, tape, CD/DVD disc, or wherever you stored them, indefinitely. This ensures that your files are available if you ever need to restore them. This is an important benefit of Retrospect not found in “disk mirroring” software used for backups. For example, lets say you have been working on an important document every day for the past month and you discover you have been making terrible mistakes for the past week. If you have been backing up every day with Retrospect, you’re not limited to restoring from the most recent backup, rather you can retrieve a version of the file from a week ago (or any point in time it was backed up). Retrospect uses a catalog file (usually stored on your hard disk) to keep track of the different generations of modified files in a backup set. The catalog lets you quickly search for files without having to actually search the backup media itself.

Retrospect provides a number of ways to protect and restore your data. There are two basic categories of operations you can perform with Retrospect: immediate operations and automated operations. For example, if you launch Retrospect, click the Immediate tab, then click Backup, you have taken the first steps in creating an immediate operation. If you make a script to do the same backup on a specific schedule, that is considered an automated operation.

All of the operations in Retrospect, whether immediate or scripted, require a source and a destination. For a backup, the source is generally a hard drive or a folder on a hard drive (Retrospect calls these volumes and subvolumes respectively). The destination is generally a backup set stored on backup media (disks, tapes, CDs, etc.).

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EMC Retrospect Business Editions

Select from two Retrospect editions to meet the needs of your business environment:

• Retrospect Server edition provides licenses to protect 100 networked servers, desktops and notebooks. Licenses can also be purchased to protect additional networked computers.
• Retrospect Workgroup edition provides licenses to protect a backup server and 20 networked desktops and notebooks. Licenses can also be purchased to protect additional networked computers.

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Requirements

Macintosh computers that run Retrospect

• PowerPC processor
• 128 MB of RAM (256 MB recommended) for Mac OS 9
• 256 MB of RAM (512 recommended) for Mac OS X
• Hard disk with at least 500 MB free
• Network backup requires TCP/IP networking
• Mac OS 9, Mac OS X 10.1.5 through Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, or Mac OS X Server 10.1.5 through Mac OS X Server 10.4 "Tiger"

Macintosh clients

• PowerPC processor
• Mac OS 7.1 or later with Open Transport TCP/IP networking
• Desktop and notebook clients: Mac OS X 10.1.5 though Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
• Server clients (Retrospect Server edition is required to back up server clients): Mac OS X Server 10.1.5 through Mac OS X Server 10.4 "Tiger"

Windows clients

• Intel Pentium class processor
• Windows 95/98/98 SE/Me/NT Workstation/2000 Professional/XP
• Uses Windows built-in TCP/IP networking
• Retrospect for Windows business editions are required to back up Windows server clients

Linux clients

• Intel Pentium class processor
• Red Hat Linux 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, and 9.x
• TCP/IP networking

Supported backup devices

• SCSI/Fibre Channel/ATAPI/USB/FireWire tape drives and tape autoloaders including AIT, DAT, DLT, LTO, Travan, and VXA
• Internal hard drives; FireWire and USB external hard drives
• SCSI/ATAPI/USB/FireWire Writable CD/DVD drives including CD-R, CD-W, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW
• Removable disks including REV, Zip, DVD-RAM, MO, and SuperDisk (LS-120)

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