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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