Agent or Network Shares? One Job or Many?

[TheTroll]

I'm in the process of reviewing our backup strategy and have a couple of questions. I don't 'own' the backup procedure, just the network and apps that are backed up and would like an independant opinion...:

Currently we're using 6.61 on NT4, with one job per server that needs backing up, using the agent. I'm told that we use one job per server in case a job fails.

I'd like to upgrade to AS9 and run it on Win2k3 (current backup machine is the last NT4 box on the network!). However, I understand that there may be some licensing issues in upgrading.

~40 Win2k/Win2k3 servers to backup, but I'm not bothered about the OS, Registry or System state, just the data in a few folders. Also, one SQL 2000 Cluster.

If I upgrade to AS9 and backup through the network shares, will I need to buy a licence for each server I back up? Will I see significant performance drop by using shares rather than the agent?

Another idea is to make everything that needs backing up available through a single DFS share. That way the backup job could be left untouched, but additional servers/data could be added to the DFS share. Is this a good plan or a recipe for disaster?

Any help or suggestions would be very welcome

Thanks!

Tim

 

[ajtmcse]

There is no license required (per machine) if you are not using agents to perform backups.

Yes you will take a signifigant performance hit without using the client agents.

 

[davidmichel]

Well actually not using the agents may or may not impact performance. The client agents use a push technology to speed up the backup and by the way also offer encription and compression. If the network is a bottleneck then the agent can provide significant improvements in throughput.

If the network performs well and do not impose a bottleneck then there may be little difference between a backup with and without the agent.