Backup software: rant + questions.

[asquirrel]

Here's my basic question: Is there any backup software that is obtainable by an end user which offers something actually worth my time over the built-in windows backup? Specifically deduplication, or 'forever incremental' are the features I'm most interested in.

 

Acronis rant: If you are thinking of buying Acronis True Image 2015, I'd say don't. Why?

1. The configuration menus are designed by a smart phone user. THIS IS A PC!
2. When I tell you "Keep no more than 3 full backup chains, and do not discard the first backup" that does NOT mean keep 4 full backups + their chains. That means keep 2 full backups, the full initial backup, and the incremental chains that follow those two backups! LEARN TO COUNT!
3. When I configure you to delete old backups you should do this BEFORE you try to backup new data. Maybe just maybe I'm smarter than your shitty software and I can compute how much space I'll have to the MB, so long as you behave in a sane manner.
4. If the backup drive fills during a backup you get stuck on "cannot find backup file..." and won't back ANYTHING up until I uninstall and reinstall your application.
5. Even when I uninstall your software, it keeps running, because the uninstaller doesn't remove the files and services under program files / Common Files.

For context: At my job I'm a solutions test engineer. You know how you can buy a 'solution' for SAP with Oracle DB from Oracle or Hitachi? I'm the guy that tests that solution to make sure it works. I work with enterprise backup software at least every week as a part of making sure that the backup and restore function of the solution works. Perhaps I'm spoiled by enterprise software not being made of poo, but ....goodness.

 

Of the enterprise backup software I've seen Avamar stands out as the choice I most wish had a consumer level option. Every backup counts as a full, but it only takes incremental after the first one. It's by far my favorite B&R software to work with. Symantec Netbackup is second. It has most of the features, but each incremental still relies on the previous full so it's not as robust as Avamar. Given that there are eleventy billion backup software choices...I was hoping for some help thinning the pack on what products I should try next. Datastor PDP seems promising, I just need to actually get the trial and give it a spin.

 

Oh, and for anyone wondering why I don't just use Avamar at home: You have to run it as a VM inside ESXi. This means that, unless you have two systems, when your PC dies you have to reinstall windows by hand, reinstall VMware Workstation (I game, so I am NOT running ESX as the base OS), reinstall avamar, recover avamar (good luck!), then restore your system. That is a royal pain. It works great in enterprises where you have the room to have avamar on its own cluster with redundancies built into other layers, but for a single PC environment...bleh.

 

The utility of dedup comes in when it allows 'forever incremental' backups by treating each incremental backup as its own full via the dedup table.