Yosemite Technologies' Yosemite Backup Advanced 8.0

Posted by Don MacVittie on May 20, 2005

Tags: NAS,  SAN,  VTL,  Yosemite,  disk to disk,  enterprise backup,  Backup & Recovery,  Data Backup and Recovery ,  Hardware,  Other,  Software and Web Development,  backup,  restore

Channel: Other

Good • Easy to use • VTL support out of the box • Granular level of security • Support for range of devices Bad • Windows P2P Networking weaknesses can cause problems with VTLs • Doesn't support directories Yosemite Backup Advanced 8.0, starts at $3,499. Yosemite Technologies, (800) 228-9236, (408) 236-7556. www.yosemitetech.com

Virtually Tape

Backup Advanced 8.0 is the first software backup product I've tested that supports VTL out of the box. VTL lets you set aside a portion of hard-disk drive to emulate tape, so you can back up data using fast disk-to-disk backups and later copy from the VTL to tape. The VTL supports virtual tape arrays up to 1 million GB and grows as you need it.

To test this, I allocated 100 GB to an array and then resized the array down to 2 GB after a backup. The system had no problem handling the resize, as long as I didn't shrink the VTL to the size of the data already on it. In a workgroup environment, however, limitations in Windows shares made moving a VTL to the network difficult. Windows kept marking shares as "read only," and though I could save files to them, Backup Advanced would not place storage on them. This problem doesn't occur in an ADS environment because access control is handled differently. On the bright side, you can add several locations to the same VTL and the system will spread tapes across all locations.