My employer has me looking into centralized network backup software. I'm certainly not the first person to find themselves at this precipice, and I'm hoping I can learn from other monks' experiences. I realize this of course has nothing to do with Perl or even programming generally, but I find the quality of advice here far outweighs any other online portals I frequent. Plus, perhaps the advice here will be helpful to other monks in the same situation :)

Previously, we'd been using Bacula (freeware) from a linux server, backing up other heterogenous servers (Linux, Windows) via a terminal session, but as these things go, we've outgrown it. We're needing to backup not only the servers, but individual PCs now, too, and while they're in use, no less. We even need to preserve permissions now. Rather than tooling around and trying to put something together ourselves, we've convinced the boss to buy *gasp* a retail solution.

Initially, the powers-that-be had me looking at BackupExec, formerly Veritas, and the latest version seems to be laden with issues and falls short on several fronts (can't copy in-use files for the individual PCs, and Symantec's notorious customer support, to name a couple).

So I guess the "must-have" features would be:

• Cross platform (WinXP, Win2K3, Redhat Linux)
• Preserves permissions/ACLs for above OSes
• Central administration for servers and workstations
• Ability to backup files while in use (everyone turns their PCs off at night, so we have to backup during the day)

And of course, the "nice-to-haves":

• Bit-level backup (like rsync)
• Continuous backup of file changes (ie: no having to schedule backup windows)
• Backup/restore of Windows registry data
• Backup/restore for Active Directory
• Backup/restore for Exchange Server (ugh, not my choice to use it)
• Backup/restore for assorted DBMSes (ie: MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, etc)
• Support for Mac workstations (darn graphic designers...)

I'd asked earlier in the chatterbox, but the question was lost in the fray...If anyone has recommendations, you don't even know how much I'd appreciate it.