[TriLUG] Tabe Backup Software

[Chris Hedemark]

On Friday, April 25, 2003, at 09:12 AM, Meyer, David R wrote:

> I need to step up now and say that I am not trying to pick fights, etc.

David, I never thought you were picking a fight.  I hope you didn't 
think that of me (you were replying to me).  I'm a bit opinionated, 
sure.  But if I pick a fight with you, you'll know it. ;-)

Yes, I'm feeling a bit raw right now hot off the heels of a tape backup 
project where we evaluated some of the big ones (Veritas NBU, Legato 
NW, SyncSort BE, and just for fun BRU).  ARCserve was suggested to us 
but too late in the game to be considered (none of our preferred 
vendors were ARCserve partners)

It was a long hard decision.  None of the solutions were particularly 
good.  All of them were particularly bad in some areas.  This was one 
of the worst product evals I have ever been involved in because (1)the 
price of the products far exceeds the value of what you're getting and 
(2)several of these products were inherently broken in major ways and 
yet they still had no problem selling them as-is.

For the record, the thing that broke the Veritas deal for us (backing 
up files on Linux that are >2GB in size was broken) has been fixed this 
month, but it was *after* we made our proposal to management to buy 
Legato.  For various reasons I would have preferred to sip the Veritas 
poison if it weren't for that bug.  Their apathetic response to this 
problem didn't exactly win us over and gave us great pause for concern 
of how future major bugs would be handled (if at all).