I've been banging my head against the wall trying to find an online backup service that supports all of the following enterprisey features:
- Full-system backup for Linux and Windows 2003/2008 servers, including windows registries, System State, Active Driectory, etc. This requirement knocks out most of the well-known online players.
- Encryption with locally-controlled keys
- De-duplication, with a sane and hopefully adjustable retention policy. Two weeks is not enough. We have a 45 Mbps connection at HQ, and about 5 TB uncompressed in 10M files to back up. Some individual files are as large as 150 GB (MSSQL and Exchange databases). This implies bandwidth-efficiency.
- Support for SQL Server 2005/2008 and Exchange 2007/2010 backups via Windows Volume ShadowCopy Services. (Again, almost none of the online services do this well, and the "dump to a native file and then back that up" scheme just doesn't work for 150-GB databases.)
- Reasonable filesystem metadata support, including restoration, with Windows and Linux permissions being a must. (Shockingly missing from many online providers).
- Gruanular Sharepoint item restore is a highly desired feature, but we can live without it.
- Offers pay-as-you-go, all-opex pricing without "reserving" space like Mozy.
- Is not BackupExec, which we just cannot trust anymore to do an actual restore. Downloading multi-GB service releases and doing QA and installation on those every few weeks has become untenable. Yet another once-great product Symantec has destroyed.
- Reasonable success/failure reporting with enough information to track down what data was missed or skipped (again, most of the online players fail massively in this area).
- Ability to restore data (and hopefully System State) into a public cloud in a DR scenario (knocks out the VMware-specific solutions which looked otherwise promising).
I've taken trials or read in depth about CrashPlan, Mozy, JungleDisk, Carbonite, i365, and a few others. But even the "server" or "pro" versions of these services is lacking one or more "table-stakes" features that all business-oriented, premise-based backup software has had for ages. Note we are not looking for free or even inexpensive here, just something that works well and is reliable without a lot of care and feeding.