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UltraBac's remote administration and notification are surprisingly good. The UltraVue administration module provided a useful snapshot of the network's backup activity, and a handy feature let us access the log directory of any system. UltraBac also supports MAPI, and after a little work with Exchange, we were able to create an e-mail distribution list that delivered information on unattended backups. This is a good start, but BEI needs to find a way to support more delivery options based on a significantly larger number of events, such as backup failure or tape drive failure.

Software Moguls SM-arch for Windows NT version 4.2
SM-arch debilitates its powerful set of backup tools for a distributed and agent-based backup network by encasing them in a badly designed interface, and teaming them with difficult-to-use agents and extremely poor documentation. It's too bad, because with a modernized and detailed interface, revamped agent interfaces and comprehensive documentation, SM-arch would be a decent backup program.

Long active in the Unix arena, SM-arch supports both NT and Unix on the server level and NT, 95, 3.11 and virtually every variant of Unix on the client level. To make an administrator's life easier, the installation program creates a directory and dumps the clients onto the server--you simply need to share the directory and your clients can do their own setup.

SM-arch is a centrally managed client/server backup application that uses push agents to speed backups from client workstations and supports distributed backup devices. One of its more interesting features, shared by NetWorker and ADSM, is the ability to administer Unix clients from NT and vice versa.

A big problem with SM-arch is its lack of documentation. The application claims to allow distributed backups for any machine on the network, but you won't read about this feature in the manual; it's absent from "Read Me" files and warrants only a brief mention on the company's Web site. Eventually, we realized that we had to reinstall the entire server on any system that we wanted to use as a backup server. Also missing from the documentation was any reference to configuring or managing clients and agents.

While device configuration at least appears in a dialog box, it still relies on UNC (universal naming conventions) device-naming. And it doesn't check to see if the correct device driver is running: When we installed SM-arch without disabling the ADSM SCSI driver, SM-arch reported the available drives by the ADSM naming convention and didn't properly recognize our changer until we'd disabled the ADSM changer services and re-enabled the NT services. The problem is that under NT, you can have standard NT or proprietary tape device drivers. Proprietary drivers don't work in place of standard drives, and applications that use NT's tape interface should check the driver status to see if the current set is compatible.

All this would be less infuriating if the software were easier to use. But instead of providing graphical file selection on the client, you must type path names into a dialog box. The administrative application isn't much better; there's little use of the right mouse button, and the interface isn't quite intuitive--for example, clicking properties on a system icon in the backup window brings up overall backup properties, not the properties of that object.

SM-arch is also missing many of the tools that define modern backup. While support for distributed tape devices is laudable, lack of support for disaster recovery, and the absence of any application agents for online programs, such as Exchange, SQL Server or Lotus Notes, marks this program as an also-ran.

David A. Harvey is a freelance reviewer and journalist who lives in New York. Send your comments on this article to him at daharvey@mindspring.com.