Paying 5 Chaos for a good backup schema and disaster recovery plan

"

How would that effect the outcome of using Avamar or Microsoft System Center?

I'd look first for an Apple solution to centralized backup, and think about running two silos. Avamar and CommVault quite possibly have IOS agents. I haven't been involved in backing up Apple devices, but they are definitely a thing, and if anything these Enterprise-X companies like to say, it's that they have an offering for that.

If the budget is totally wrecked, and Zmanda too difficult, you can do things like backup desktop defices with GFI Backup. That's really going getto, but costs effectively nothing, and is easy to install. Problem is, no centralized monitoring and what not. Users will only yell at you after they lose their data, you know...

Anyway, I'd settle out as part of the project, when it gets real, what the budgetary constraints are first thing. This will set a lot of the solution constraints. After that, work some proposed topologies, including any offsite approach, if you're going to have one.

Don't ask the big vendors about that at all, unless your budget is titanic. Offsite replication, and *poof* now we're talking one hundred gees... and you can actually do this manually with rsycn on a cron job or what not.

--C

What about something like : http://sourceforge.net/projects/restore/

It is freeware, so I'd assume that there is some manner of function gap between the ones you previously mentioned, plus it hasn't been updated since 2009.

Other than that, you touched on Zmanda and Bacula, and a few other things, any others you'd care to pick out of this list : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software

Regardless, pretty sure Courageous won the 5 chaos. Unless somebody has anything to add.

Researching video codecs now. Not sure they'd really need full HD quality video for archival backups.

God damnit.

Everybody I've talked to thinks it is a horrible idea to send the guy an action plan to implement some cloud storage backups while we're waiting on hardware for more failover protection.

Sent it anyway, now to let the cards fall where they may.