Terry's

Backup Professional

Evaluation Page



May 2001

Backup Professional came to my attention when a review copy was sent to me when I first started doing these enterprise backup evaluations.

Well, it lay around for about a year until the rebuild of the linux file server was due. Once this recalcitrant boxen was subdued and rebuilt, with an upgrade to RedHat 7.0, I decided it was time to give it a run.

It didn't get far. The install failed with "no such file or directory" and it continued to fail with this message. At first you think that maybe you have typed the name in wrong, but no, it is correct. then you think that perhaps the name is corrupted with hidden characters and you try swiping the name, but "no such file and directory".

So you go back and start to read the instructions in details. These give the distinct impression that they have suffered from transmission over a bad communications line, but you plow on through some very unclear and brief instruction notes. Unfortunately, they assume that everything is going well and really only state the bleeding obvious (if it was working).

Hmm, at this stage, it is definitely not recommended. I'm off to the WWW page to see what they have. Their WWW is at http://www.unitrends/bp.html and it offers evaluation copies that you can download (servers and clients), but the worrying thing is that it looks to be the same version that was distributed on the CD I received. Anyway, I'm off to download a server and few clients and give it a workout. Will get back with the results.


Round Two: I've finished the demo downloads from the server. These are version 1.3.2 and didn't take too long on a modem line although I used wget and manually kicked of each download, which involved checking progress over a day.

Chmod +x lnxg_srv and ./lnxg_srv and away we went. Smooth and easy until the question of inetd.conf came up and at which point it barfed as I didn't have one. My system was RedHat version 7.0 and this version could not handle xinetd yet. Hmm, this proved to be fatal later. Progress on and set up each of the clients in a similar mode. Have it label a tape then try to run first backups.

Here things started going wrong again. Although the tasker was running on each box, there was no way a backup could be started. On each occassion the request failed to find the server.

I wasn't too impressed when an email to support produced that old standby of "upgrade to the next version", but it isn't available yet and oh, upgrade to RH7.1. So we have had a version out that doesn't handle xinetd in RH 7.0, that has been out for quite a few months, nor is a fix mentioned in the documentation.

The doco is completely useless. If you are intelligent, then you don't need it. If things don't work then it is unhelpfell and has no real problem solving material.

As far as I'm concerned, I won't be trying Backup Professional in a big hurry again. The installation was easy, the interface was easy to navigate (tapes were so much better than Arkeia), but in the end, it failed to run. Finally, Tech support's response wasn't too helpful or reasonable.




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