We recently purchased two PowerVault RD1000 (in the rack mount) to backup our PowerEdge R310 running Windows SBS 2011 locally. The hardware is very good: the RD1000 is easy to install, the cartages are solid and data transfer is relatively fast (thought the R310 has only USB 2.0 ports).
On the software side, however, I am not fully satisfied. The Windows backup application does not recognize the cartiges as removable storage devices. That is probably a limitation of the OS, but annoying nevertheless because it is a very simple solution. The software that comes with the RD1000, Retrospect, feels unintuitive and lacks a few important options such as backing up open files which is a must for us. Since I have to purchase this option separately, I am wondering if not buying something else altogether. I looked into Symantec Backup Exec and although a little pricey, it seems a more complete option (I think it came with earlier versions of the RD1000, not anymore). Alternatively, there seem to be a number of appliances that could do.
In the medium to long term, I am planning to move to an online backups solution (probably when we upgrade to Windows 2012 Server), but I would like to keep a local copy with frequent local files snapshots as well and the RD1000 seem to be a good option, especially for archiving the data periodically. Currently we have a Windows Small Business Server 2011, but we are not using the Exchange and SharePoint servers as I moved that to a cloud solution already. What software, appliance, or other type of solution would you recommend?
Thank you.