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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. We recently switched to Amanda, it and Bacula are fairly good open-source, but they don't really support cross-platform yet and the server services are not yet available in Windows if that's where you're looking. If you have the patience and time to test, clients are now available and can be coupled with ntbackup systemstate scripts to generate a fully recoverable windows system. I would encourage oodles of testing before putting it on a mission-critical machine. With these 2 options you get all the availability of features and options without having to pay for each minor detail. On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 14:38 -0400, Brian Pillar wrote: > Anyone out there have any experience with any backup solutions? > > We're looking at an EMC Avamar to give us backup to disk to tape, but > the price tag stands out in a not so good way. I have also looked > into Barracuda's backup service, but it does not appear that the > backup data can be duplicated to tape or another device except in > their cloud, and we are just not comfortable with our data out in a > cloud somewhere (at least not yet). > > Thanks, > > -Brian > > > > Brian Pillar > RHS Information Services Microsoft Network Administrator > Michigan State University > 517-353-1694, FAX: 517-884-0248