Picking a commercial backup utility is a hard job. The only one that’s harder is writing one. The data provided here covers a lot of areas and can be confusing at times. Be sure to compare the headings here with the questions that are in the RFI at http://www.backupcentral.com. The questions may help to explain some of the finer points.

The RFI that I use is extensive; it has more than 300 questions. Its main purpose is to put all vendors on a level playing field, and I have used it many times to evaluate backup software companies. Although it is extremely difficult to word a single RFI to cover the entire backup product industry, this is my best attempt at doing so. Most of the questions are worded in such a way that a “Yes” answer is considered to be a good answer, based on my opinion, of course. Even though you may not agree with me on every point of the RFI, you should find it very useful in evaluating backup software companies. This RFI is not biased toward any particular product. It is biased toward how I believe backups should work. You may find that some of the questions are looking for features that you believe you may not need, especially the more advanced enterprise-level features like dynamic parallelism. I would submit that you might need them at some point. You never know how your environment will grow. For example, my first commercial backup software setup was designed to handle around 20 machines with a total of 200 GB. Within two years, that became 250 machines and several terabytes. You just never know how big your environment is going to grow. However, if you are simply looking for a backup solution for a small environment, and you are sure that it will never grow much larger, feel free to ignore questions about such features.

The same goes for any other features that you know you will never need. If you know that you’re never going to have an MVS mainframe, then don’t worry about a company’s response to that question. If you know that you’re never going to have connectivity between your company and the Internet, then don’t worry about how a product deals with firewalls.

I also should mention that there are special-use backup products that serve a particular market very well but may not have some of the other enterprise-level features that I consider to be important. For example, there is a product that does a great job of backing up Macintoshes. They do that job better than anybody else, because they’ve done it longer than anybody else. (There are other products that back up Macintoshes, but they do not “think” like a Macintosh environment thinks.) This product does just that. For a purely Macintosh environment, that product might be just the product for you. (Of course, if you have a purely Macintosh environment, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book.)

The RFI is available at http://backupcentral.com.