6.5 Rocks!

[wojtow]

Despite all the griping about varioius aspects of the 6.5 upgrade I've seen in this forum, I'll be a bit of a rebel and say that I think it rocks!

 

Granted, they didn't well explain the pricing and other aspects of the upgrade. At first I was a bit put off too, as a long time customer (since like version 3). However, when I contacted Dantz support they gave me a fair deal on the upgrade and I got the features that I needed without having to contribute any new limbs.

 

Technically speaking, there are some good reasons to upgrade.

 

The NUMBER ONE COOL NEW FEATURE is the ability to execute multiple backup threads in the background. It can now be performing multiple backups at once (so long as they are to different backup sets and clients...a particular resource can only be used for one thing at a time). But even if you are only doing one backup at a time.... the VERY NICE part is that you can still mess with the rest of the configuration while the backup is running. As our backup times have increased from more machines and files, etc I often found it difficult to catch it at a free time to make config changes. Now you can configure it while it is still running, though you probably can't mess with particular resources while they're in use.

 

ALSO USEFUL... Now supports Mac OSX and Linux. We've added a bunch of Linux machines and have found it to work well. We even back up some non-supported HP-UX machines by NFS mounting thier filesystems through a Linux box that is running the client. This works too.

 

As a side note, as pricing goes, Retrospect is still a good deal. Being in an academic environment, we're largely used to surviving mostly on open-source low-cost solutions, so it's always a bit of a stretch to get a commercial product with a multidigit pricetag. However, before my most recent upgrade, I shopped around for various other commercial enterprise backup solutions and found it compared quite favorably price wise.

 

Haven't run into any problems yet (though I don't use open file or SQL backup)

 

[Mayoff]

Thanks for the feedback. We appreciate hearing it.