What do you feel is the best software for regular (maybe nightly) unattended backups?

Also, is there a program which can make backups to two places at once?

Tivoli backup/restore agent

veritas(or veritas by stomp) is the industry standard. A backup to a CD-R takes up too much resources to do two at once, I would think. However, I think you can schedule two backups to different places to occur one after the other.

I was actually thinking of doing 1 big backup to an external and then a second back of most important files to a CD-R or CD-RW.

In addition a hardware backup ... we use a program called "Advanced Backup". It simply copies files from one computer to another based on a schedule you set. We have a rather complex system for backing up just about everything in just about every place possible.

Of course...nothing beats a backup on disk (stored off-site)...but this is a simple shareware program that could provide an extra bit of confidence in your backup system.

Its made by Argentum Corporation... you can check out their site at: http://www.creabit.com.

A word of warning: If you don't pay to register...then you'll get annoying pop-up messages asking you to

Presuming some form of MS OS.

don't know how big this backup is, but for the first backup, you want a mirror, or a duplicate of your original drive. Think Symatec or whatever today's name is does that with Ghost. There is a second company, was called Powerquest, that will also make a duplicate HD.

Although it sounds good, I have never been able to create a full backup, transfer it to a new HD, and get the second HD to run troublefree.

For important records, unless they are very large, use a CD-R, not a CD-RW, use the append choice, and save every one of them. Do backup frequently. If you have a big database, you can use DVD's, but a compressed CD-R will hold over 1gig of data, and sometimes 2 gig.

My company database got crossthreaded a couple of weeks ago. After the problem was created, the software ran for 3 days before the problem really manifested itself. If we had been using eraseable media, we would not have had a good backup.

I do not like shareware or MS backups. They frequently do not cross MS OS. win 98 bu data with win 98 program cannot be read on XP with win BU. However Veritas will read the win 98 bu with veritas(then called seagate or somesuch) into win2000 or xp.

That program has some great error messages . Just tried doing a backup tonight and received the following error: "Some problem found" . Yeah, that's a great problem explanation

Veritas NetBackup Professional

I use Retrospect.

I guess it depends what quantity and kind of data you wish to back up. Are we talking about static files on one XP workstation or twenty servers? a huge and constantly-changing .PST? a MySQL database? Do you wish to back up to disk, or recordable media? Locally or over a network? Some combination of the foregoing? Are you looking for cheap/shareware or bulletproof/spendy?

What's "the best software"? The cliched truisms you've probably heard before are applicable: 1) It depends; and 2) You get what you pay for. If you provide more specifics, it'll be possible to give you better answers.