Ability to filter the History tab

[klubar]

It would be great if there was a way to filter the history tab, making it easier to find/inspect particular scripts. I'd like the ability to include (and/or exclude) particular scripts or one-time runs. I have a script that runs every 4 hours (user desktop backup) that totally clutters the History tab.

[DavidHertzberg]

(Disclaimer: Anything I may say about the intentions of Retrospect "Inc." in this or any other post is merely the result of "reading the tea leaves", the "tea leaves" being documentation and public announcements supplemented by an occasional morsel from Retrospect Sales.  I have never been paid a cent by Retrospect "Inc." or its predecessors, and I pay for my upgrades. Any judgements expressed are—obviously—mine alone. The same is true of Retrospect's history, especially with references to here.)

klubar,

Here's why and how to create a Support Case for your three desired enhancements to the History tab of Activity Monitor.  However I think it won't be necessary, because IMHO Retrospect Windows 18 will replace Activity Monitor with a GUI facility similar to what's briefly described in the "Reports" paragraph on page 26 and more fully described on pages 185–188 of the Retrospect Mac 17 User's Guide.  Pages 186–187 describe the Retrospect Mac Console facility for creating reports with additional columns, equivalent to what you proposed in the OPs of one thread and another thread directly below.  (I should point out that adding an additional column to a report, as I did for some testing a couple of years ago, requires "scrunching" the existing columns.)  Pages 187–188 describe the Retrospect Mac Console facility that can be used to add criteria for a report, such as a filter for the History tab you suggest in the OP of this thread.

At this point you'd probably want to ask me two questions.  The first would be "Why wasn't this facility added to Retrospect Window years ago?"  The answer to that is in the first paragraph of the "History" section of the 12 September 2019 version of the Wikipedia article on Retrospect.  The key sentence—shorn of WP links now-deleted—is "In 2009, EMC was working on adding an updated user interface and separate administration Console similar to that of the newly released Macintosh variant version 8.0, but mandatory Windows security settings starting with Windows Vista/Server 2008 subsequently forbade UI interaction with an application auto-launched by a task."   That means—as the second paragraph of the "Retrospect Macintosh 10 and Retrospect Windows 8" section of the 15 September 2017 version of the WP article says—"the equivalent of the separate Retrospect Mac Console user-space process and 'backup server' root process must be a single user-space process under Windows—which could result in problems if the Windows 'backup server' Retrospect process is not kept running continually. To avoid such problems, Retrospect Windows 8 (and subsequent releases) allows (a) a Retrospect Launcher application to constantly run as a Windows service that will automatically start the 'backup server' process whenever a scheduled script is waiting to execute, and also allows (b) a Taskbar system tray icon that can be right-clicked or double-clicked to manually launch the 'backup server' process for Immediate or monitoring operations."  Most Retrospect Windows users insist on "auto-launching" the "backup server", so there's no point in developing a Retrospect Windows Console facility that could be used only by a minority.

Your second question would be "Why do you think the Activity Monitor will be replaced with a separate Console in Retrospect Windows 18?"  As I stated in the second long paragraph after the disclaimer in this May 2020 post, "StorCentric upper management has publicly announced it intends to build a Retrospect 'backup server' that runs on at least a beefed-up Drobo version of a Linux-booting NAS, and my information is that Retrospect engineers are busily at work implementing that.  Since NASes don't have their own monitors and keyboards and pointing devices, it's obvious a NAS 'backup server' will have to be accompanied by a Mac and Windows Console that connects to it over a LAN using (probably) a Web server on the NAS.  Lo and behold, a Retrospect Console Preview was released on 3 December 2019—looking rather like a dumbed-down existing Mac LAN Console but also running directly on a Retrospect Windows 'backup server' (where IMHO it'll be better when fully implemented than the 1990s-designed built-in GUI)."  Further evidence is that the StorCentric Slasher—my epithet explained in the first long paragraph after the disclaimer in this October 2020 post—has condensed to a single paragraph in the Retrospect Windows 17 UG the descriptions of the Activity Monitor tabs—complete with screenshots—that were on pages 256–265 of the Retrospect Windows 16 UG.  IMHO that means the Activity Monitor is not long for this world.