Hopifan wrote:
> Thank you for response.
> To clarify, my current setup is:
> about 30 remote offices with between2-50gb of data each. Each office has 
> Symantec BackupExec running ($700 initial cost), each server in each location 
> has a tape drive ($800 initial cost) and 10 tapes ($300 initial cost), so 
> basically to backup these 30 offices locally cost me 30x1800=$54,000 first 
> year + admin overhead and time, etc. so the question is: what can I use to 
> backup data from these 30 offices to my central DataCenter in Wisconsin? I 
> was doing some testing backing up one of the offices using BackupExec over 
> the WAN I got 200mgb/hr transfer ratio, not too good. SO I need some software 
> with good compression or other algorythm to pump data over the WAN, is Amanda 
> or Zmada the answer?
> 

If your links are slow compared to the size of your data, it may be
more efficient to use something like rsync to make a central copy of
all the remote servers, and then just back up that copy locally
using Amanda or even your existing backup software.  That way you only
have to copy the unchanging parts of your data once across the WAN,
and from then on the only WAN traffic will be new or changed blocks
of data, and it won't load your WAN to have your full tape backups
run as often as you like.
   I currently use this approach with some offsite servers and it
works well, however I'm strictly in the Linux world and don't know
how well the Windows rsync programs (such as DeltaCopy) actually
perform.  Perhaps someone else on the list can comment on that.

Frank

-- 
Frank Smith                                      fsmith AT hoovers DOT com
Sr. Systems Administrator                       Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online                                   Fax: 512-374-4501