Opinion: Enterprise backup options for the Mac looking up

Computerworld - Editor's note: An earlier version of this story was missing a link to more detailed information about enterprise backup solutions for the Mac. This story has been updated with the correct information.

While backup and recovery options for Apple's enterprise systems haven't always been a strong point of the Mac platform, a new crop of applications and technologies is pulling Mac OS X closer to -- and in some instances, beyond -- Windows and Linux.

Before looking ahead to what's coming, it's important first to look back. And that means a quick refresher course on Retrospect, a mainstay of the Apple community since Mac OS 7 was hosting e-mail, files and FileMaker databases. The venerable app had solid features and drivers for a fairly large subset of tape libraries. Unfortunately, it peaked in the late 1990s around Version 4.3, long before the introduction of Mac OS X in 2001. Since then, it's been in a steady decline.

Competition? Not so much on the Mac platform. Although a few consumer-level backup options existed, the best alternative for backing up a Mac was to simply drag files to a server, an external SCSI hard drive or a Windows server. Windows had options like Veritas Backup Exec and ArcServe -- and a Windows version of Retrospect. The Unix and Linux camps also had a variety of quality products from which to choose, including some eventually ported to Macintosh.

Whither Retrospect

More than a year after Mac OS X arrived, Retrospect 5 belatedly followed, offering compatibility with Apple's revamped OS but few new features and, more importantly, reliability issues that would plague it in the years to come. Retrospect 6 was released at Macworld in January 2004, and for a short time, the Macintosh enterprise community had high hopes for backup software. Later that year, Retrospect's parent company, Dantz, was acquired by EMC, a leader in enterprise storage systems, for just under $50 million.

EMC has never had a particularly good reputation on the Macintosh platform. Its Clariion unified storage systems never had a native Mac client, and the company has only recently started putting some energy behind the Macintosh version of its industry-leading virtualization client, VMware. What could have been a step in the right direction for backup solutions on the Mac side turned into what some would call a failure on the part of EMC.

Since 2004, Retrospect 6 for Mac has received just one minor point upgrade, and that was largely to make its backup software compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. On the PC side, Retrospect 7 emerged in October 2005 and was followed by Version 7.5 last year. With the possible exception of the demise of QuarkXPress, has there been a longer fall from glory among once-popular Macintosh apps? Not by my recollection.