Jeffrey> I never really saw that as a real world limitation.  I mean,
Jeffrey> I don't know many IT departments who have the equivalent disk
Jeffrey> capacity of production just for staging.

With the advent of large/cheap IDE RAID arrays, it's becoming more and
more possible to have large disk staging areas.  It's also quite cheap
and gives great performance in terms of doing your backups without
having to multiplex, while still letting multiple clients write data
at different data rates.  

Jeffrey> I would have to have 50TB of stage disk for my NDMP data if
Jeffrey> fulls, 20TB if incrementals.  Not exactly plausible for most
Jeffrey> people.

You have a huge churn rate on your incrementals, I generally see
around a nightly incremental size of only 10% or so of fulls.  Are you
in a large data wharehouse or transaction site?  

The big problem with NDMP and NetBackup is that I need to:

    a. dedicate a drive to NDMP, I can't use it for anything else.
    b. I can't stage to disk, then duplicate to tapes.

So we have to write to tape, then vault from one tape to another.  It
works, it's just a pain since all our other backups don't require
this.

John
   John Stoffel - Senior Unix Systems Administrator - Lucent Technologies
         stoffel AT lucent DOT com - http://www.lucent.com - 978-952-7548