I am not a Perl fan, but as a network administrator it has always been a vexing task to find backup software that can handle everything that can be thrown at it.

Especially as technology advances and the amount of space we use in our networks have exponentially increased in size. Another caveat is having mixed technology, it throws a spanner in the works for any backup technology. As far as backup hardware, it has fallen by the wayside, a tape streamer can no longer handle the huge amounts of data on a network. BackupPC, when run on a dedicated Centos machine with a couple of raided SATA drives does absolutely wonderful with backing up a network. It handles large files brilliantly, has an amazing flexibility in its configuration, and has a pooling, and compression future which is incredible with space savings. We have about 1.5TB of data that is backed up on our network, and takes less than 500MB actual space after the pooling, and compression. The biggest headache is to install it, and to configure it correctly, (a reasonable Linux understanding is a bonus) once that is done, it never has to be worried about again, except when you need to restore something, or add a new device to backup. Though it is always a good idea to do regular checks to see if the backups went through. The benefits of a working system outweigh any installation difficulties.