Section 8.1. What to Look For

8.1. What to Look For

When looking at a potential backup product, there are many questions that you should ask yourself:

• Does the product fully support my platforms?

• Does the product back up raw partitions?

• Does the product back up very large filesystems and large files?

• How will the product help me meet extremely aggressive requirements?

• Does the product back up many clients to one drive simultaneously?

• Can the product automatically create multiple simultaneous backups from one client?

• Does the product handle data requiring special treatment?

• Does the product have storage management features?

• Does the product reduce network traffic?

• Does the product support a standard or unique backup format?

• How easy is the product to administer?

• How secure is the product?

• How easily does the product perform recoveries?

• How well does the product protect the backup catalog (e.g., database, index)?

• How robust is the product?

• How automated is the product?

• Can the product verify its volumes?

• What does the product cost?

• What vendor is selling the product?

These issues are discussed in the following sections.