Unix Backup and Recovery

Conclusions

Picking a commercial backup utility is a hard job. The only one that’s harder is writing one. The data provided here covers a lot of areas and can be confusing at times. Be sure to compare the headings here with the questions that are in the RFI at http://www.backupcentral.com. The questions may help to explain some of the finer points.

The RFI that I use is extensive; it has more than 300 questions. Its main purpose is to put all vendors on a level playing field, and I have used it many times to evaluate backup software companies. Although it is extremely difficult to word a single RFI to cover the entire backup product industry, this is my best attempt at doing so. Most of the questions are worded in such a way that a “Yes” answer is considered to be a good answer, based on my opinion, of course. Even though you may not agree with me on every point of the RFI, you should find it very useful in evaluating backup software companies. This RFI is not biased toward any particular product. It is biased toward how I believe backups should work. You may find that some of the questions are looking for features that you believe you may not need, especially the more advanced enterprise-level features like dynamic parallelism. I would submit that you might need them at some point. You never know how your environment will grow. For example, my first commercial backup software setup was designed to handle around 20 machines with a total of 200 GB. Within two years, that became 250 ...