What's New

Ransomware Protection

Worry less with Retrospect Backup 18's Ransomware and security features.

Ransomware attacks are increasingly sophisticated, having the capability of watching for cloud account credentials, deleting backups and cloud storage, then encrypting everything and demanding a ransom. It's imperative to build defenses against this escalating attack. SMBs and large businesses need a backup target that allows them to lock backups for a designated time period. Many of the major cloud providers now support object locking, also referred to as Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) storage or immutable storage. Users can mark objects as locked for a designated period of time, preventing them from being deleted or altered by any user.

Retrospect Backup 18 integrates seamlessly with this new object lock feature. Users can set a retention period for backups stored on supporting cloud platforms. Within this immutable retention period, backups cannot be deleted by any user, even if ransomware or a malicious actor acquires the root credentials. Retrospect Backup 18's powerful policy-based scheduling allows it to predict when those backups will leave the retention policy and protect any files that will no longer be retained, ensuring businesses always have point-in-time backups to restore within the immutable retention policy window.

Retrospect Backup 18 makes it easy to add an immutable retention policy with Amazon S3. When creating a backup set, simply check "Immutable Retention Policy" and specify the number of days. Retrospect Backup 18 will mark any backups to Amazon S3 as immutable until that date in the future and delete any backups that are no longer protected by the retention policy, saving costs on storage space.

Security Reporting

Security is critical to any backup environment, and Retrospect Backup 18 surfaces the wealth of data it can see into a broad set of reporting improvements to bring security to the forefront. Retrospect Backup now includes the same detailed backup report for Windows, Mac, Email, Export and the Management Console, ensuring a clear, consistent experience across each product. Email reporting is now available daily and weekly to stay up to date on the status of your backups and emails include the exported report as an attachment.

Included in the backup report is "% Changed", the percentage of files changed in a given backup, alerting admins to any significant changes in their data protection, such as a ransomware attack or an incorrect volume backed up. Also included in the backup report is "Total Files" and "Total Data" to highlight how much data is currently protected on a given volume compared to how much was newly protected in that backup.

Retrospect Management Console has two new views: Backup Report and Locations. The Backup Report view has the same information from the application but aggregates across an entire infrastructure or multiple clients for our partners. The Locations view is a worldwide map of all users, Retrospect Backup servers, and remote clients, down to the city. This geotracking ability helps businesses understand exactly where all of their resources are located. If there is a resource somewhere unexpected, it's easy to spot.

With Retrospect Backup 18, every feature in Retrospect Management Console is included with a product license.

Improved First Launch Experience

Retrospect Backup has been protecting data at homes and businesses since 1989. Getting a first backup can mean the difference between success and failure as a business, and Retrospect Backup 18 has a completely redesigned workflow to simplify that experience while making it easier for new users to see what will be backed up.

The backup wizard starts with a single screen, showing sources and destinations with a default backup selector. Finish with a single click or add new data sources or destinations. With deep integration with Retrospect Management Console, Retrospect Backup makes it easy to send a single download link to an entire company for everyone to download the Retrospect Backup agent, install it with a single click, and let Retrospect Backup take care of the rest.

Under the hood, Retrospect Backup includes new features like 10x faster automated generation for public/private keypairs with seamless upload to Retrospect Management Console and embedded unique trial licenses to remove any barriers to getting that first backup.

Cloud Data Protection

Companies use cloud storage for all sorts of data, from website assets to affordable sharing to ingestable data. Cloud storage needs the same level of data protection as on-premise storage. Retrospect Backup 18 includes support for cloud storage as a first-class backup volume. Cloud volumes enable businesses to protect their cloud content on-site with an incremental backup or on a different cloud with an automated policy-driven workflows. With Retrospect Backup's point-in-time restore workflow, an admin can restore a file or an entire volume to the cloud with only a couple of clicks.

Microsoft Azure Support

The three major cloud providers are Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure. Analysts point to AWS at 33% of the market, Azure at 15%, and Google at 5%. Microsoft Azure support will be available as a beta in May 2021 and available in Retrospect Backup 18.1 in June 2021. Retrospect Backup will support Microsoft Azure as a cloud volume both as a source to protect and as a destination, including bucket-level object lock, for immutable backups.

Cloud-Native Deployment

Businesses are increasingly relying on the cloud to run their business, deploying infrastructure within the cloud to achieve scale while reducing capital spending. Retrospect Backup 18 and Retrospect Virtual 2021 support cloud-native deployment on Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Cloud-Native Deployment enables businesses to protect their cloud infrastructure with the same set of tools they use to protect their on-premise infrastructure while optimizing bandwidth by keeping the backup within the cloud provider's environment.

Bug Fixes

This latest release of Retrospect includes fixes for numerous issues. For a list of bugs fixed in this release, please refer to the Release Notes.