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Zenith63

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RBackup opinions please!

Hi,

I work for a small company that does IT support for about 150 small companies (10-30 user sites mainly).  With Online Backup getting more and more media time customers are starting to ask us what we think of it, who we recommend etc etc..

In light of this we're looking at providing an online backup solution ourselves, just to our own customers though (for now anyway :) ).  Reading through EE I came across RBackup from remote-backup.com.  I set it up on a server here and deployed the client on a few of our own servers to try it out.

Basically I'd like to hear from other people on here who have used it to do online backup for a few customers.  I'm interested to hear how they found the software, how backups went, how restores went, basically any thoughts/recommendations on the software at all, good or bad.  I'll split the points amongst the best answers.



Thanks very much!
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nickg5
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here are reviews and comments by three users:
http://msn-cnet.com.com/RBackup-Remote-Backup/3640-2242_4-10359738.html

three more:
http://www.sofotex.com/reviews/r19363.html

and two more:
Comments for RBackup Remote Backup:
"Experiences with Remote Backup" - Bob Brady [May 5, 2005] Product Rating: 4/5
I believe Remote Backup is the best remote backup software available on the market today. And they have verbally assured me that they would help me to resolve any open issues with them. They have also verbally assured me that their are ways to verify the backups are "Good" and my experience with their product failing was a rare occurence. I would probably have to agree.

I wound up speaking to a wonderful tech at their location that explained the anomolies he percieved to be happening to me and promised to help.

I believe the Remote-Backup to be reputable and a wonderful product that will compliment your current backup process. This and my previous post were just my humble opinion. PLEASE Download the trial and test it, Im sure you will enjoy the product.  
 
"WONDERFUL Experiences with Remote Backup!" - Jeff Springfield [May 5, 2005] Product Rating: 5/5
This stuff saved my business. I lost 120,000 files in a hard drive crash last week and thank goodness I had this software installed for the past year. It restored all my files, not one loss.

The manufacturer, Remote Backup Systems, helped walk me through the restore AFTER HOURS, even though it turned out to be so simple I didn't really need them. I guess I was just nervous. Gautam (the tech I spoke with) was really helpful and called me back within 5 minutes, and stayed on the phone until after his time to go home.  
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Zenith63

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Thanks for those.

But what about somebody from here (EE) who is using it?  With so many members I'd be a bit worried to hear nobody on here is using it?
Sorry I should have come back to this myself.  To be honest I was looking for some first hand experience with RBackup, I'd come across lots of those Google reviews myself.  

Just for anybody who comes across this thread in future - In the end I tested it myself for almost two months and was fairly unimpressed.  I think it has a lot of potential but it comes across quite unprofessional, and when backup is so important that's just not acceptable.  The GUI looks a bit unprofessional and there are numerous spelling mistakes.  There are a huge number of "undocumented features" (read: bugs), and although the company are great and getting back to you when you contact them about it I don't want to be doing free bug testing for them after forking out between €1000 and €20000 depending on the number of users you go for.  You can't really be putting it on customer's sites telling them it'll solve their backup woes when you don't even trust it yourself.  It has to be a polished product and shouldn't be released until it is IMHO.
Examples of the problems I had -
- The server was very difficult to get working in service mode, I tried it on 3 different servers with various OSs and had hours of grief each time, I ended up just launching it as an application which isn't really acceptable on a server you need to have going for long periods of time.
- The client was also very difficult to get going in service mode.  One of the undocumented features here is to view hidden/system files in the client you need to change the logon credentials of the service to an admin, I'd have thought this should have been done automatically at install time, or at least the option be given.
- The client was just hard to get installed in general, the installer is quite poor.  I spent 4 hours on a customer site messing with it before I gave up.  The installer doesn't change the attributes of files it copies from CDs, so when the program tries to run it can't get write access to the database and so fails.  The un-installer doesn't delete the ODBC DSN, so if you reinstall to a different directory the program won't run.
- Bit Backup is their new system for backing up just the bits of a file that have changed instead of the whole file, but if you try this with more then a couple of GBs (which isn't much for a server!) it never finishes, it just gets slower and slower.
I won't go on, but you get the idea.  I was initially very optimistic, I really went into the test with a positive feeling towards the software, but unfortunately the software just isn't a finished product yet...
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