AOFO. Is it worth it?

[Kalle_Saarinen]

Hello,

I'm currently backing up 7 Windows servers with BE agents. We haven't purchased AOFO license. At the moment we are missing from 2 to 10 files at each backup run. 99,5% of which are irrelevant temp files. (this is when the backup actually works and doesn't fail)

So the question is to AOFO users. Is it worth using AOFO? Do you get 100% of all files with it?

Thanks!

[David_Sanz]

AOFO is worth in many cases, but certainly not in all of them. Your case is clear: you don't need it. But people with file servers that may have open files at night or companies with propietary databases that do not have a specific agent should use AOFO.

Is specially works in Windows 2003 integrated with VSS.

Regards

[Joshua_Small]

We run a certain proprietry service on many of our servers. The database it uses is locked whilst the service is running and standard backups miss them.

The vendor's official position is that backups are pointless because their service is so good it can never go down or experience corruption, which we all know is kind of silly.

To cut a long story short, AOFO is a life saver in this situation. It should be mentioned AOFO isn't supported by anyone in this configuration- the service vendor is useless, and Symantec can't be expected to support backups of a product they've never seen.

We have however done multiple DR tests and satisfied ourselves that it _does_ work. If you ever find yourself in this position, do yourself a favour and purchase AOFO.

There is a tricky situation of course, where servers skip files in the printer spool and similar, and the "your backup had exceptions" leaves you wondering whether you should be doing better, when you're in fact doing fine.