Current list of requests

[blm14]

- A more robust client-management tool. For example, a report which kind of combines the reportswatcher tool and the "backup report screen" which could show, for each client: 1) does communication with backup client work, along with status (in use, connected, not-connected, etc) 2) Date of first backup, 3) Date of last backup, 4) Total backup set storage utilization. It would be REALLY nice if you could then click on any client and see all the snapshots and sessions in all sets that client has been saved to and maybe even be able to restore from there with right-clicks. But I'd be happy enough just knowing on the basis of the BACKUP SET not the logs what's going on and what clients are just simply not able to be seen by retrospect

 

- The ability to SORT sessions and snapshots inside of backup set, by client name or date or both

 

- Ability to store more client information inside clients, eg: email address. It would be very nice to be able to send emails to the client if eg: proactive backup is not able to communicate with client for more than a week. I realize that the message from the client (you have not been backed up since...) should cover that, but sometimes people get new machines, or the client becomes corrupt and this doesn't work. It would be great to be able to set up various email alerts to the CLIENT.

 

- This is a big one,but it sometimes drives me nuts. Bitwise backups: The Parallels package for MacOS and MS Outlook are the bane of my existence. I swear that personal.pst and WinXP.hdd use up 50% of my available space on RAID for differentials. And yet the actual AMOUNT of change in those files is usually quite small, at most a few megabytes. It seems unbelievably inefficient to have to store an entire 1gig .PST file because a user has received a SINGLE new 2kb email and saved it to personal folders in outlook. I realize this would require a huge amount of effort on the part of EMC programmers but it would make your product vastly more powerful and useful.

 

- Some re-engineering of your configuration folder. Maybe store scripts, client descriptions, and some other stuff in XML files instead of proprietary-format binary config75.dat

 

That's all I can think of for now...

[blm14]

A couple more:

 

- When transferring backup sets, it would be nice to have more information than just a progress bar for the current snapshot. For example two additional progress bars: one showing the total number of snapshots remaining and the other showing the total number of sessions remaining. Or even better, ANOTHER one showing the total # of GB remaining.

 

- I've noticed that if I move a tape drive and catalog file from one server to another, when it comes time to write to the tapes, retrospect loads tapes from the tape library one at a time until it finds the one it's looking for. I'm using a DLT-S4 superloader3, and when I look in devices retrospect shows the bar codes of the tapes in the tape sets, and when I look in the backup set under members it also shows the barcode number. So why does it need to look at the tapes one at a time, can't it just pull in the tape it needs?