> I have been told that I didn't allow for the cost of my time to
> implement and babysit our system;  but from watching one of my
> colleagues struggle with our Tivoli implementation, I'm not sure it
> makes that much of a difference.

Hrm.

In a past life, I implemented Amanda in a company that backed up about
100GB of small Sybase dumps, a few web servers, a few app servers, and a
couple of user workstations to some fairly nice tape drive.

The company went out of business, but it was a dotcom, and they wanted
to maintain a presence as though they were still in business (to try to
sell the company, you see).

They left all the servers in colo but there was no-one to administer
them.

I continued to get daily emails from Amanda for months afterward as it
kept doing its best to spread backups across holding disks and the
single tape that never got changed out. I knew when they finally pulled
the plug on the Amanda machine, because that's when I stopped getting
emails.

I recall Amanda needing VERY LITTLE BABYSITTING whatsoever, and seemed
to make it very clear exactly what I needed to do to remedy whatever
problems it was having ("someone change the damn tape, please!").

It was very clear Amanda was well-written to deal with edge cases and
abnormal circumstances.

It is this experience that has me currently implementing Amanda in a
3-office ~100-employee ~60 workstation mixed Unix/Windows environment. I
don't feel a single twinge of concern about whether or not Amanda is up
to the task, and quite frankly, I WOULD FEEL CONCERN about implementing
some commercial backup system, because the ones I've seen in operation
are buggy, annoying, and time-consuming.

--
pv