March 31 2016
Eight years at Retrospect
I joined Retrospect eight years ago today.
I started as a software developer, working on Retrospect for Mac. I transitioned to Vice President of Strategy two years ago, and this year, I became Chief Operating Officer, overseeing Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Customer Service, Finance, and Operations. It’s really neat to work on a product that’s been around for three decades and with a team who has seen one or two of those decades.
This month at Retrospect, we shipped a new version, one of the largest releases in our history: cloud storage support (to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and others) as well as performance improvements across Mac and Windows in six languages.
A decade ago, at EMC, our team was twice as large, but we didn’t do simultaneous Mac and Windows releases or multi-lingual releases. Now, we use off-the-shelf tools like GitHub Enterprise and Amazon S3 along with homegrown tools like our automated cross-platform test suite to ship more faster. We’re able to add a steady stream of new features, performance enhancements, and bug fixes to both Retrospect for Windows and Retrospect for Mac.
I use Retrospect Desktop at home. The server runs on an old 2008 MacBook Pro laptop, and every day, it backs up my entire household: 6 computers with 5 TB of data. And with the new release, every document from every computer is transferred off-site to Amazon S3 nightly, secured with AES-256 encryption. All for the price of three dozen Starbucks lattes. (As someone who drinks two lattes a day, I go through three dozen quickly.)
You cannot find a comparably-priced product with such a rich feature set, and I’m happy to be part of the team that ships it.
