With
ever larger hard drives comes ever more data to be
backed up. Folks with a home office or small business
now typically have tens or hundreds of gigabytes
worth of data stored on just a few PCs. Backing up
that data has always been a pain, or very expensive,
or both. With Retrospect for Windows Professional
Edition, EMC seems to be taking individual and small
business users seriously by providing a backup package
that can be as simple or complex as the user requires.
The
product installs on an XP box (and others, see
Requires above) which contains the storage device.
Retrospect Professional also includes licenses
for two other Windows PCs so that they can be backed
up to the storage PC. The Professional version
does not support client software for Windows servers.
With Professional, the storage device can be a
tape drive, hard drives including USB attached,
CD/DVD devices and NAS devices. Tape libraries
are not supported with Professional, but if you
already have and maintain a tape library then you
are probably ready to move up to EMC's Small Business
Server anyway.
The
included manual is excellent and covers the product's
use and limitations very well. This is powerful
software and I recommend you spend some time reading
the manual before setting up your backup strategy.
That's not to say you can't get a backup done right
away. The program has a wizard that will walk you
through the process. However, to get the most benefit
you really should read Chapter Two-Fundamentals
and Chapter Three-Hardware at the very least.
