Dantz Development Corporation, a longtime supporter of the Mac platform, this week announced Retrospect 6.0, the latest version of their backup and restore suite for Mac OS X. We had a chance to sit down with Don Chouinard, Director, Product Marketing, to brief us on some of the new and updated features of this version of the product. Unless otherwise noted, these changes apply to all versions of the product, which are broken down into Server (backup local Mac and 100 networked clients, including servers) Workgroup (backup local Mac and 20 networked desktop or notebook clients) and Desktop (backup of local Mac and 2 networked desktop or notebook clients).

One improvement in the 6.0 product is speed. With folks using faster media, typically a hard drive, for the backup target, the size of the buffer used between the source and target media became an issue. By increasing it from 64K to 1 MB, users can experience performance gains from 20% up to 100%. Another improvement in the 6.0 product is in recognition that media sizes, such as those offered by RAID arrays, are getting larger. To this end, the 6.0 product now breaks the terabyte limit for the size of a backup set, and can create backup sets in excess of 1,000 TB. Another bonus is that a backup set can now not only span multiple tapes, but also multiple hard drives.

For the Workgroup and Server products, which support tape autoloaders and libraries, there are some new goodies as well. Tape library features include support for cleaning tapes, barcode inventory, and import/export slots. To save time, Retrospect can remember which tapes are in which slots when Retrospect quits and restarts, avoiding a time-consuming rescan of all tapes. There is now also support for Fibre Channel tape drives and tape libraries in the 6.0 product.

Retrospect 6.0 will be available for download on January 26, and a physical boxed version in early February. The new and upgrade pricing for the product will be $799/$349 for Server, $499/$199 for Workgroup, and $129/$59.95 for Desktop.