Final Post

Hey, it is now late 2012 and I just want to report that the same tape unit is backing up all the same servers (DB, Exchange, UNIX and Windows file systems) using Tivoli Storage Manager.

Things have been very smooth, though there have been a couple of problems here and there.  One or two hiccoughs a year I can deal with, and the folks at TSM support always manage to completely remedy the situation.  A lot of times I find that there was something on our end that went astray.  This never happened with the Netbackup support, always something else broke within a couple of days, it was like a merry-go-round of problems.  Fix A, B breaks, fix B then C isn't working. Fix C and now A stopped again - repeat.

We have had two unfortunate server problems and TSM restore has worked extremely well during the high pressure time of need.  We couldn't have asked it to be there and do its job any better.

For months I worried that Netbackup just wouldn't be up if we needed to restore something - or that Murphy's Law would come along and the files we needed to restore would not available because that system was broken for the days we need to restore from.

TSM seems robust, mature and reliable.  All things that Netbackup was not.

In the end I hope anyone who stumbles across this is better informed about Symantec's Netbackup product.  In time things might change but why should I ever be tempted to go back?

I'll restate that in past jobs I have worked with other backup software, so it's not like I'm hung up on TSM but TSM is the option that management focused on here after weighing a few vendors.  Oracle Secure Backup worked very well where I was 5 years ago.  Other backup software worked very well but over the last decade the product has merged with other companies and no longer on the market under the name I used it as so I won't mention the name.