"Does backup have to be open source??? Maybe there are good commercial solutions available?" I've dealt with almost every major commercial backup solution, and

"Does backup have to be open source??? Maybe there are good commercial solutions available?" I've dealt with almost every major commercial backup solution, and in my opinion, all of them suck. Why? Mostly because of intuitiveness. I've seen knowledgeable techs get confused by terminology during setup and during testin/restoring. Differential, incremental, archive bit, etc. Another note is cost. At one the support startups I was at, we licensed a backup solution that we customized so the customers thought it was our own in house, when it wasn't really. Many of the bigger names can get really $$$ really fast. (looking at you EMC) Backup doesn't have to be open-source, but honestly I don't know how much I would trust anything else? I have, reluctantly at first, recently embraced the google drive ecosystem, combined with vault for regulatory compliance, and the versioning that comes with google, makes me feel more confident regarding documents stored there than documents put on random servers and being backed up to other places. The problem with your original question though, is that open-source solutions still suck as well. That's why, depending on the complexity and needs of the situation, will generally just roll my own using rsync, git, rsnapshot, etc, in a transparent way to the user. eg, user uses file server A, wich backs up to backup 1, with backup 1 backing up to backup 2. I would also like to point out the growing issue of raid. In my mind, at hdd sizes where they are, ZFS or a similar solution is the only way to go. Raid-5 is dead to me.