Backup Software for Your Network

Curious about which backup software has the features and the functionality that are right for your network? Welcome to the Windows NT Magazine Lab's backup software reviews. We put four backup software products through the wringer to see what they can do and what they can't do. (For information about how I tested these packages, see "The Lab's Test Configuration," page 88.) In each package, I found a trace of the software's historical lineage that appears through the various updates and revisions, and I saw definite signs of a market that is heating up.

HP's ongoing effort to migrate its OpenView OmniBack II (HP recently dropped the price of the OmniBack II by 81 percent) from a UNIX world to Windows NT has come with its fair share of troubles. Similarly, Seagate Software's latest release of the traditionally midrange Backup Exec, the basis for NT's system backup tools, finds that running with the enterprise pack involves thousands of workstations across multiple platforms, and takes more than just supporting an infinite number of servers. And both of these companies need to look at NovaStor's gadget-laden NovaBack+, a possible future contender. Last, let's not forget St. Bernard Software's backup solution: If you can't run with the big dogs, act as a plugin for them (for information about this option, see "Open File Manager," page 90).

OpenView OmniBack II
With the levels and degrees of data and media protection in HP's OpenView OmniBack II backup software, this application is the type you want to protect your company's data. Everything about OmniBack II is mission-critical, sort of like the software you'd expect to find on the space shuttle. I discovered this analogy is rather fitting, because you just might need to be a rocket scientist to install, configure, and operate the software.

On the mission-critical side, the software is extremely robust, and even well thought-out, especially in the way it deals with recording devices and their media. For example, in addition to offering on-the-fly data encryption as each new medium (tape, CD-ROM, etc.) is queued up in a recording device, the software assigns the medium an identification number that tracks the number of times it has been written to and how long it has been in the device. After 250 writes and rewrites or 36 months, the software considers the medium to be sufficiently compromised to warrant replacing. This feature is nice when your business depends on the integrity of your media.

Additionally, by enabling write-protection as a default, the 32-bit native software protects data from something accidentally overwriting it. Also, before it starts writing, OmniBack II determines whether a particular medium has enough room to hold all the data for a particular session. You can configure the software to access recording devices sequentially (cascading) for backing up significant amounts of data if one tape will be insufficient. Or when time is a consideration, you can configure the software to simultaneously write up to five modular data streams to one standalone medium. This capability is a big plus, particularly in large or very large installations where backing up hundreds or thousands of workstations, one at a time, is simply not realistic. Other device-specific features include the ability to configure redundant or auxiliary drives in the event of drive or media failure, and robotic-autoloader and magazine support, including barcode tracking and tape cleaning.

If you don't like waiting for software to do its thing, OmniBack II lets users set up and configure additional backup tasks while other operations are running--a nice feature and a potential time-saver. And this software does not lack features: To notify specific individuals of the status of various jobs, OmniBack can use email, HTML pages, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), HP OpenView IT/Operation, or any combination of these methods. The software supports remote access operation, is flexible about scheduling backups, and accounts for holidays in its internal calendar.

OmniBack II operates in a homogeneous NT environment or a mixed environment with NetWare and UNIX. Through application agents, OmniBack II supports Microsoft SQL Server 6.0 and 6.5, Microsoft Exchange 1.0 to 4.0, and SAP R/3 3.0. The software also supports the following file systems: NT FAT, VFAT, High-Performance File System (HPFS), and NTFS. OmniBack II also supports NT-specific registries, access control lists (ACLs), NTFS security objects, event logs, and extended file attributes.

You can push the OmniBack II client software across an NT network for installation and authorize client machines, with varying degrees of functionality--from restoring the information pertinent to only its operations, to full enterprisewide access with administrator permission. The software uses a cell structure to define areas of influence in an OmniBack II environment. A cell is a group of client machines, media agents, and recording devices that one cell server controls. Also, you can control multiple distributed backup environments (cells) centrally for enterprise installations.

As you would expect from a software package of this caliber, OmniBack II has built-in software compression--Lempel-Ziv 4.3--good for roughly 50 percent compression, depending on the type of data. When you use the built-in software compression, expect time delays--backing up my test file took about 25 percent longer with the software compression enabled.

A minor irritant is the lack of support for using the control and shift keys and a mouse to select numerous files simultaneously. Because most of the screens are based on the NT Explorer interface, as shown in Screen 1, I expected the software to have this capability.

My only real gripe with this package is installation and setup. The HP literature touts the intuitive design and easy installation of this package, but I wonder whether HP is describing the same software that I'm trying to use. For starters, when any package comes with a 150+ page booklet titled Concepts Guide, instead of Installation Guide or Operator's Manual, you can probably assume that intuitive doesn't apply to this software. In all fairness, this package is too large and too involved to install easily. And the documentation doesn't ease the learning curve. Perhaps that's why HP Professional Services offers the training course HP OmniBack II Implementation Assistance Program.

Not all administrators will find the installation so daunting. If you thoroughly understand the NT domain naming structure and the various permissions granted to individuals or groups of individuals, you shouldn't have too much trouble getting OmniBack II going. The software uses NT's domain naming structure to define its cells, and the TCP/IP protocol for communications.

As for the interface, I became familiar with it in a few days, but I wouldn't call it intuitive. That's a label I'll reserve for an interface that doesn't require opening multiple screens to perform one task, such as backing up data. Admittedly, when backing up networks, you must consider numerous variables: devices, security, encryption, hardware and software compression, scheduling, and the files you need to back up. A good interface puts the controls for as many variables as possible on one screen, which reduces errors an administrator can cause by failing to open a window to tweak a variable. Also, the OmniBack II GUIs include large, useless graphics, which to me do nothing more than take up perfectly good control space.

Overall, the power of this software, particularly the extensive enterprise scalability and multiplatform support and the way it deals with media, are impressive--some might call the software stellar. However, the interfaces and installation are enough to put you in orbit. I'd like the software more if the interfaces were more consolidated and if the documentation were better (i.e., step-by-step), rather than "you need to set all of this stuff like so" when "like so" is spread over five or six different menu screens.

NovaBack+ 5.0
If you are considering NovaStor's NovaBack+ for Windows NT as a backup solution for your network, be aware that this package does not support multiple domains. In fact, it can back up only those machines that are mapped to its hard disk. This limitation is a shame, because the engineers at NovaStor have created and integrated some truly ingenious weapons that would delight network administrators to have in their backup arsenal.

For starters, with the Internet and intranets as the logistical channel of choice for digitized communications and with the critical nature of backed-up data, the decision to use a software package that includes some form of virus detection seems to be a no-brainer. Surprisingly, finding this functionality integrated into backup software applications is far from the norm.

NovaStor added this functionality with Alwil's Avast32 virus-checking software and had the intelligence to make this functionality bidirectional--the software detects viruses both when writing and restoring. Better still, when I ran the virus scanner, it slowed recording time by just 11 percent--an entirely acceptable performance tradeoff if you consider the potential benefits.

NovaBack+, as seen in Screen 2, includes built-in software compression, which, like virus checking, is increasingly moving from the status of a luxury to that of a must-have. Most mass storage devices have some form of hardware compression built in. For those that don't, having software compression available in your backup program is like having the right change for a computerized tollbooth that doesn't take bills--the only way to go. NovaDisk+ uses Stac Electronic's compression algorithm, which achieved 22.3 percent compression on a mixed test file that included fonts, text, applications, images, and animations, with a marginal effect on performance.

The most intriguing aspect of this program is its disaster recovery scheme, NovaBoot. The NovaBoot routine resuscitates machines on your casualty list. NovaBoot walks users through the necessary steps to create a series of boot disks (seven for our network server). These boot disks, with a verified backup tape of the target machine's hard disk and an NT CD-ROM, pump life back into dead circuits. At least, that's the theory.

In reality, this sunny scenario didn't shine on my network. The first problem I encountered was a bug that stopped the machine from requesting all the disks in a restore set. After I fixed this problem, the application again halted prematurely when it didn't recognize the tape device I installed, or more accurately, couldn't decide which tape device was the right one. Fortunately, with the help of some heroic tech support, I quickly fixed the problem. However, after I got the backup tape to write back to my hard disk, the battle still wasn't over. I needed to use the NT boot disks (which the NovaBoot software created) and the NT Server CD-ROM to completely rebuild what I had destroyed.

A significant shortfall of the software is that it fails to identify partitions in a hard disk and their respective file sets. So, if your hard disk is partitioned and it has a melt down, you can't just pop in a new hard disk, run the NovaBoot restore disks, and get your system back. You'll need to know the size, file types, and identity of your disk partitions and remember where NT system files resided before the crash.