It appears that everyone is looking for a perfect backup software. And nobody is really happy with the software they are currently using. Like quite a few others, i've been looking for a good backup solution too.

To start a search, one needs to know the goals. These are my goals (for now):

• It has to be intelligent. I'm going to write my backups to a slow media, USB drive, and through network. This means that the software has to be able to do incremental backups.
• It needs to be flexible. Not all of the hosts are connected to the network all the time. I don't need it to take backups when i'm offline, but i want it to be able to run backups as soon as i'm back online.
• Sane configuration defaults. I'm not keen on editing every single configuration file out there and i don't consider it worth the disk space to back up things like /usr which can be restored by reinstalling.
• Uses Cheap media. I don't have need (or money) for expensive media like tape drives. I'm happy with the backup media breaking down, i'll just buy a new one. It's a backup system, not a data archive.
• Fire and forget. I don't want to pay attention to everything that is happening. I want to be able to trust that everything is running smoothly without checking up all the time.

Bonus list:

• Client configurable. Configuration resides on client, i like to keep the configuration on the workstation so that i don't need to clean up multiple places once a computer is replaced.

I've started a small [[!list of features in backup solutions|2007/backup_comparison]]