Like many others, I've been waiting for years for an overhaul of Retrospect. Version 6 and its crashy behavior and clunky interface with (seemingly) hundreds of separate windows drove me crazy every time I had to reconfigure or use it.

Retrospect 8 is a huge improvement in almost every way. The interface is much easier to navigate. The separation of the 'engine' from the control console is a great idea (once you get used to it). Setting up scripts and monitoring what's happening is infinitely easier. And so far for me, it just works.

But perhaps best of all, after years of neglect and stagnation, it appears that EMC is actually taking this product seriously. They've moved quickly to fix bugs and respond to criticism of the initial release.

I also commend them on having reasonable upgrade pricing; it's so rare these days.

Retrospect is a powerful backup tool. If you're looking for one-click backups, this ain't for you. But if you have multiple computers and terabytes of data to backup and keep track of, it's a great too.

PS
They are not kidding when they say G4s will be slow when used as a server for Retrospect 8. I have a 1GHz MDD that I've used as my main backup server for a while, but it's straining under the load. The actually backups work OK, doing about 450 MB/minute. But when scanning a large volume or matching to existing catalogs, it takes a very long time.

It will work fine for me until I can replace that backup machine, but it's something to consider when planning your backup system.