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I’m looking to replace an unreliable backup solution with…you guessed it, a reliable one. Or at least an improvement. Currently, we’re using Retrospect 6.5 on a Windows Server and it has not scaled well for us. Nuff said.
I’m curious about what others are using in the commerical space, experiences, and even exploratory findings. I’ve delved into BRU Backup and BakBone’s NetVault. I plan on evaluating Avail Solutions Integrity as soon as it’s GM. I’ve even looked at Veritas NetBackup and CA ArcServe but after discovering pricing, I was scared off; that goes for BakBone as well. Any experiences to share that haven’t been expressed already on this Forum?
Thanks in advance for any insights.
Robert
You do not say how much data you are backing up, is it spread over several machines?, one machine?, servers?, clients?
How often are you wanting to backup?
What capacity backup hardware do you have?
Single platform, mixed platform?
Do you need to restore systems or just data?
Give us an idea of what problems you are having with your current solution, what is unreliable about the setup?
What issues are you looking for these other products to resolve?
Sorry for asking so many questions, but it’s impossible to even consider any suggestions until we know the answer to at least some of these questions.
My apologies at my lack of detail.
We are currently backing up 76 network clients roughly evenly split between Macs and Windows systems, in addition to 5 Windows servers. We need to scale up to 1000+ networked systems, also fairly evenly split between platforms. We recently moved from a 2 drive DLT7000 30 tape autoloader to an old 2 drive LTO-1 24 tape autoloader. We are looking at replacing this with a multi-drive LTO-2 at some point. We are only looking to restore data not system state. Ideally, weekly tape changes with a 1 month archive. We have a gig backbone with 100Mb to desktop in most areas.
What makes the current solution problematic is that the scripted backups fail on a fairly regular basis. Before switching to the LTO library, the backup sets would get out of sync and require a repair at least once a week. With the DLT library we were maxing out at 45MB/min data transfer throughput. Moving to LTO has improved to 200MB/min on average and also seemingly eliminated the out of sync issue. However, the new problem is that Retrospect loses connectivity with one or both of the drives, requiring a restarted of the server.
I’m sure there are more questions, but that’s a start to answering some.
Robert