[Nottingham] veritas

[Robert Postill]

Martin,
A couple of things.  One is that Veritas (and Arcserve as well if memory 
serves) use tar and a database together to deliver the "solution".  Most 
commercial products also don't have a disaster recovery option so you 
won't get bare metal restore of a critical box either.  That means if 
you're backing up one box and only want the FS you can use amanda or 
bacula or A.N.Other FOSS project instead.  The real reasons to buy a 
commercial solution are:
1. SAN/NAS backup
2. DB hot backup (especially for oracle/notes/SAP et al).
3. Multiplexing tape drives.
4. Dealing with tape silos and libraries.

Veritas does have a decent interface which runs on Java, so your mileage 
won't vary across releases/platforms.  In terms of how the product is 
organised it follows the conventions of volumes and drives controlled 
through a central server.   You may well find that to be an interesting 
problem, how do you restore your backup server... It's a hell of a 
learning curve if you haven't done it before, you could buy Unix Backup 
and Recovery (ISBN: 1-56592-642-0), its old but its a classic.  Also 
checkout http://www.storagemountain.com, they've generally got good 
descriptions of the products and options (sadly they've dropped the 
forums).  Finally for linux-specific advice my experience (mostly Tivoli 
Storage Manager) is that if its not Red Hat/SUSE you're not going to get 
support, so don't chuck your solution if you're using something less 
conservative.

Hope that helps.
Robert.