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Thanks for the quick info on this. Aside from the licensing issue I
really thought this was a satisfactory product, my rant may have made it
sound otherwise.
On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 17:43 -0400, Adam McDougall wrote:
> On 04/13/10 15:55, Joseph M. Deming wrote:
> > For many years we used BakBone's NetVault application with reasonable
> > satisfaction. They provide updates twice annually, the annual support
> > cost was reasonable for our small/mid size data. They have a fair base
> > package with a whole slew of add-on licenses for particular use.
> > Periodically, their updates would introduce bugs that broke a job and we
> > had to work with support to fix it (usually deleting a config file
> > somewhere in the program files then re-creating the job under the newest
> > version, so usually nothing nasty).
> >
> > It supports Unix& Windows clients, can do disk --> disk, then copy that
> > to tape, or go straight to tape. The to-disk option was an additional
> > license I believe, direct to tape comes in the base package. Still, it
> > takes a bit of monitoring and babysitting to assure it is running
> > week-by-week, but all backup solutions do in my experience.
> >
> > VERY ANNOYINGLY, when we decided to stop paying our annual licensing
> > fees recently and move to open-source, we were left with what was a
> > 'perpetual' license that no longer was eligible for updates. However, 2
> > months later when we rebuilt our backup server with new hardware, and
> > tried to install the 'perpetual' license so we could use BakBone for
> > recovery purposes from our old tapes, the program complained about an
> > invalid license. This is because the license from BakBone was generated
> > and tied to the original machine name and some hash of it's hardware
> > (like M$ loves to do). When we contacted BakBone and asked to generate
> > a new license so we could use are properly purchased and licensed
> > software on this new machine, we were told that we would have to pay 10%
> > of the cost of the software. So, they were basically holding our data
> > hostage for a cost of between $250-$1,000 depending on whether they
> > wanted 10% of the support cost or 10% of the original software purchase
> > cost. And, yes, the original cost of the backup package we bought (if
> > you did the math) is a bit alarming, but we had some 15 client licenses,
> > disk-to-disk option, and a couple other features making us purchase the
> > 'datacenter' package. A basic package was much cheaper in terms of the
> > original software cost.
>
> I believe the trial demo is fully functional for at least 30 days and
> you can still use it to restore data. It can be installed over and over
> again on unix at least. Thats not to say the company is not deceptive
> about licensing.
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