Retrospect vs. BRU
At work we are looking at getting a backup solution for our department. Ive been checking out the Exabyte VXA tape drives (the 1U autoloader seems like the way to go for us) and of course the subject of software has come up.
Before I talked to a guy at Exabyte I didnt know Retrospect had any competition, but as Ive done a little more research, it seems that BRU is definately a solid offer.
What I was wondering is if anyone has any experience with both or either of these two programs and could compare them fairly. So far, Ive only seen people give fairly biases reviews of each and Im not convinced either way.
My plan is to use the software to do nightly backups of about 20 workstations onto an Xserve G5 that will have an internal 1.2 TB hardware RAID (we dont have it yet, so testing is not an option yet). Ill probably set it to level 5, so we will end up with about 800 GB usable.
In addition to nightly backups (which would protect against drive failure, file corruption and user error), Im planning on backing up to tape. Im not stuck on Exabyte, but they seem to have a solid offer with the VXA-2 Packetloader 1x10 1U with Firewire. We will be attaching the Xserve to an Xserve RAID SAN that we will be setting up, so both PCI slots will be taken, so Firewire 800 is the only optioin from what I can tell. A portion of the SAN will need to be backed up (Final Cut project files and digital photos, but not the video files associated with the video projects).
At any rate, Tolis mentions that BRU supports disk-to-disk-to-tape backups, but I dont see anything that suggests that Retrospect can or cannot do this (Dantz doesnt seem to have any contact info on their website, so I dont know how to get ahold of them).
Also, some people have complaits for each. Retrospect is supposedly cumbersome and sometimes unreliable while I understant that BRU lacks an intuitive interface.
Any advise would be greatly appreciated!
Before I talked to a guy at Exabyte I didnt know Retrospect had any competition, but as Ive done a little more research, it seems that BRU is definately a solid offer.
What I was wondering is if anyone has any experience with both or either of these two programs and could compare them fairly. So far, Ive only seen people give fairly biases reviews of each and Im not convinced either way.
My plan is to use the software to do nightly backups of about 20 workstations onto an Xserve G5 that will have an internal 1.2 TB hardware RAID (we dont have it yet, so testing is not an option yet). Ill probably set it to level 5, so we will end up with about 800 GB usable.
In addition to nightly backups (which would protect against drive failure, file corruption and user error), Im planning on backing up to tape. Im not stuck on Exabyte, but they seem to have a solid offer with the VXA-2 Packetloader 1x10 1U with Firewire. We will be attaching the Xserve to an Xserve RAID SAN that we will be setting up, so both PCI slots will be taken, so Firewire 800 is the only optioin from what I can tell. A portion of the SAN will need to be backed up (Final Cut project files and digital photos, but not the video files associated with the video projects).
At any rate, Tolis mentions that BRU supports disk-to-disk-to-tape backups, but I dont see anything that suggests that Retrospect can or cannot do this (Dantz doesnt seem to have any contact info on their website, so I dont know how to get ahold of them).
Also, some people have complaits for each. Retrospect is supposedly cumbersome and sometimes unreliable while I understant that BRU lacks an intuitive interface.
Any advise would be greatly appreciated!