Dantz Development's venerable Retrospect backup software is now fully Panther-compatible with an electronic download release that shipped today. Although Retrospect 5.1 would work under Panther, and Retrospect Client ran fine in Panther, Dantz had released a laundry list of situations to avoid and problems in launching and getting the application to run after restarts and system failures. (We all stuck with Jaguar on our backup servers.)

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Retrospect 6.0 could be seen as a maintenance release with a hefty upgrade price tag unless you have one of four special needs: making backup sets larger than one terabyte; backing up to an Xserve RAID; using tape libraries over SCSI or Fibre Channel; or spanning multiple hard drives with a single backup set, something Adam ran into with his current hard drive-based backup strategy. The company also notes speed improvements.

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The software is available for download right now; the boxed version follows in mid-February. Pricing is complicated, as is usual with the number of versions Dantz offers for small, medium, and large networks.

Retrospect Desktop can back up one local Mac and two networked Windows, Mac OS, or Red Hat Linux systems with the included Retrospect Client software. However, it cannot back up computers running Mac OS X Server (either locally or with Retrospect Client), and it doesn't offer the large tapeset, Xserve RAID, or terabyte options. List price is $130 with a $60 upgrade from previous versions.

Retrospect Workgroup and Retrospect Server include client support for 20 and 100 machines, respectively, and all the large data options. However, only Retrospect Server can back up Mac OS X Server systems. Workgroup lists for $500, and an upgrade is $200; Server is $800 with a $350 upgrade.

All versions include Retrospect 5.1 if you want to run Retrospect on a Mac OS 9 system; Retrospect 6.0 can back up older Macs running Retrospect Client software. Also included is a bootable disaster recovery CD, but only with the boxed version, not as part of the electronic-only purchase.