Product Reviews
Smart Backup for Windows
Retrospect delivers cutting-edge backup and restore technology
Dantz is
one of the long-time players in the backup field (Retrospect 1.0
was released in 1989), and Retrospect 5.0 is a mature and full-featured
network backup program. The folks at Dantz have obviously put a
lot of thought into the backup and restore process, and have done
the work needed to help administrators protect their data without
a lot of fuss.
Like most
products in its niche, Retrospect can back up a single server or
multiple systems on a network. One bonus, though, is its Backup
Server component, which can queue machines for backup when either
the computer or the backup media isn’t available. So, for example,
you can specify that you’d like full backups of 100 notebook
computers, and Backup Server will grab the data from each one as
it docks to the network. You don’t have to worry about going
through lists and reports to see which machines still need backing
up.
Retrospect
also puts a lot of effort into making the restore process easy.
Incremental backups are automatically distributed among multiple
media sets so that you can do a full restore from any set with a
single pass, rather than needing to reload multiple daily backups.
This rebuilding includes registry settings and security information
so that in most cases you can get a machine back from a crash with
only a single restore (some areas of Windows 2000, including encrypted
files, are not yet handled by Retrospect).
 |
Retrospect Backup 5.0 Server can
queue a client machine’s backup job for later, when that
machine, such as a laptop for a roaming user, is again attached
to the network. |
Retrospect
includes a full scripting and automation facility, so once you’ve
got it set up, you can just let it run itself. It supports a wide
variety of tape drives and CD-R backup media with its own specialized
drivers, and automatically detects and configures support for your
backup hardware.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.