Thanks for all the feedback, it has helped us to reach a decision.
It's probably not the very best solution of all, but it seems quite
reasonable and is within our budget, plus we can order it today, as we
need to... So we'll get an Autoloader (PowerVault TL2000) and a PC
server, as we already have an offer for that. However, we'll probably/
most likely run the backup on a G5 and use the PC server as a test
machine - something we've been wanting for some time but weren't able
to buy. Whether we'll go with Retrospect or BRU is not yet clear, but
since the software is cheap compared with the hardware, we'll be able
to buy it later, even next year (so we have gained some time to
evaluate at least the software more thourougly). If this config won't
be working for some reason, we can still fall back on original config
with the PC server.
At the moment, we are running Retrospect 6.1 on a G4, and are backing
up client computers (including laptops) as well as our file server
(XServe) with it. Since the amount of data on the XServe has
considerably increased during this year, these two backups are no
longer working well together (full backup of the server now takes 4
days). We'll of course keep the old backup server, tape and software
and use it to backup the various client machines, because that's what
Retrospect is obviously best at. We'll use the new server & tape for
backing up our file server(s). It seems that this is the best we can
do at the moment. I really wish we would be informed earlier when
there was money that has to be spent, so that we could do a real
evalution instead of this "buy the next best" thing... but it's the
same procedure every year, and I don't think this will ever change.
Sigh... but at least we CAN buy something this year, so I shouldn't be
complaining too much, should I!
