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Is anyone aware of any good (for a given value of "good") alternatives to ntbackup? There's a few quirks with ntbackup that I still find odd, and occasionally (and for no obvious reason) ntbackup just doesn't back up - usually complaining about that the wrong tape's inserted even though it's been told to just use the tape that's in the drive regardless.

I've experiemented with cygwin's tar and cpio and Win32 ports of these utilities, but I've not had any luck getting them to see the tape device (so if someone does use these utilities to write to a tape device, also be interested to know how).

Essentially all I'm looking for is a reliable program that I can tell to back-up a list of locations to the tape, and not to care about anything like formatting tapes, or sticking volume labels on them (and conversely then makes it fairly straightforward to restore off as well). On the flip-side, I don't want something that will attempt to manage our tapes.

Don't get me wrong here -- ntbackup can do the job, but its quirks are making look at possible alternatives. Any suggestions? If it's open source, even better.

5 Answers 5

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Symantec BackupExec is very good in managing tapes and does not have the issues of NTBACKUP. You can download the 60 days trial from Symantec website and decide if it is good for you.

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Tape backups? In direct response to your question I would suggest trying to write a script and try running it as a scheduled event / process instead of using ntbackup.

In indirect response -- have you seen the prices of hard drives lately? How hard would it be to replace your tape drive with one or more hard drives? Just some thoughts. It would be a LOT faster and certainly you would not need special tools.

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  • Direct answer first: writing a script calling what program? Currently it's a batch file running as a scheduled task that calls ntbackup through the command line. Indirect response: the problem there isn't technical but process, and persuading the holders of the purse strings to release them...
    – Callie J
    Nov 30, 2009 at 23:04
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http://ping.windowsdream.com/

free tool same like ntbackup..

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Acronis® Backup & Recovery™ 10 Server for Windows is best backup software i overseen. This will sort your all problems. It has lot of features. check it.

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We have used http://www.backupassist.com for many years.

You can download a trial to check it works with your hardware.

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  • I'v had some very bad experiences with BackupAssist :( Nov 14, 2011 at 21:34

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