EMC has released its Retrospect 8.1, the company’s backup and recovery software for the Mac platform. The company claimed that the Version 8.1 offers increased performance on Intel-based Macs and runs on PowerPC Macs, supporting individuals and organisations that use older Mac computers for their backups.
The company said that the new version improves performance over version 8.0 in a number of areas, including backup, data verification and restore activities. Improvements to the user interface of EMC Retrospect 8.0 are also present in the 8.1 release.
EMC Retrospect 8.1 is currently available in English only and localised language editions are expected to be available later this year in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
Peter Wharton, vice president of marketing, consumer and small business products division at EMC , said: Adding support for PowerPC Macs was a critical step towards providing small and mid-sized businesses the best backup and recovery product for their needs. Many existing Retrospect sites, as well as small businesses that have either outgrown Time Machine or that wish to centralise their backups, might only have a PowerPC-based Mac to utilise as a Retrospect backup server. EMC Retrospect 8.1 now seamlessly addresses that need.
Positioned as a comprehensive backup and recovery software programme between Time Machine and enterprise-level backup applications, the company’s Retrospect 8 has been reportedly redesigned with an enhanced user interface, a new engine that runs in the background and a host of improved capabilities.
Eric Ullman, director of product management in the Retrospect group at EMC, said: When such a respected and widely-used application as EMC Retrospect gets its first UI overhaul in more than ten years, we recognise that changes will be required after the public spends some time with the initial release.
“With version 8.1, we’ve taken the best feedback from our knowledgeable customers and made numerous enhancements to the UI—including updating icons, improving workflow, and providing better responses to the user’s actions—to please both new and existing users alike.
Retrospect 8 offers many features to Mac users that include disk-to-disk-to-disk (D2D2D) and disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) backups with point-in-time backup transfers between similar or different media types and disk grooming that removes out-of-date backup data to free up space; streaming of data to multiple disk or tape storage systems; and certified AES-256 encryption of backup data.
