With Retrospect 8 for Windows and Retrospect 10 for Mac, users are experiencing the biggest improvement to Retrospect’s overall backup and restore performance in the past decade. Retrospect’s new Instant Scan technology drastically reduces the amount of time spent preparing for each backup, which ultimately translates to greater protection and reduced costs.

For example, on a small, mixed platform network of 20 computers containing a moderate number of files, Instant Scan can cut several hours from nightly backups.

That’s extra time to strengthen your data protection strategy:

• back up critical data more often, or
• back up more computers with the same Retrospect server.

Of course, your backups could also just take less time, giving you more room for future growth. Regardless of how you use the time savings, this benefit has immediately tangible results.

Retrospect 8 for Windows introduces an add-on that provides a new level of restore flexibility: The Dissimilar Hardware Restore add-on makes it almost trivial to perform a complete bare-metal restore or disaster recovery to a completely different computer.

Now, when a Windows server or PC fails, Retrospect can boot the replacement computer—whether it’s a newer model of the same design or even from a completely different manufacturer—and perform a complete restore, including the operating system, apps, registry entries, and so on. At the end of the process, the Dissimilar Hardware Restore add-on adjusts the drivers to account for differences in the hardware automatically.

Without this technology, performing this kind of restore is challenging, and it often ends up being a time-consuming process involving the migration of user data and reinstalling applications. Now it can be quick and painless, and everything gets restored.

Retrospect 8 for Windows gains the same WebDAV cloud storage support present in the Mac version, which allows Retrospect to automatically send backups offsite to protect against things like fire and theft.

Do you need cloud storage or want to set up your own private cloud? It’s easy. Cloud storage providers like Egnyte (www.egnyte.com) and Internet hosting companies like Dreamhost (www.dreamhost.com) provide affordable, commercial WebDAV-accessible storage, and it’s free to add WebDAV support to nearly every web server platform.

Retrospect even allows you to create a local disk backup and then take it offsite to quickly seed your private cloud backups. From that point on, Retrospect need only send updates, and if you ever need to perform a complete recovery, you can simply retrieve the physical disk (or a copy) for the fastest restore.

Please see Retrospect for Windows and Retrospect for Mac for a list of all the improvements we’ve made to Retrospect for Windows and Mac. They include:

• Support for Windows 8 and Mountain Lion
• An all-new Retrospect Client for Windows
• On-demand backup and restore for client computers
• Administrator control of client-side features