Here is a brief description of some important/noteworthy features of Plan/B. This is not a complete list. If you're curious as to whether or not the feature that you need is included, please feel free to drop me a line.

General



  • Backup anything, to anywhere: You can use any kind of device that Plan/B knows about (currently CDROM, Local disk, Windows Network share, FTP device) as either a source or destination. There is no limitation (as there is in DataArmour).
  • Incremental mode Copy only what has changed, saving bandwith and time.
  • Multiple sources, multiple Destinations: A backup may source it's files from multiple machines and devices. The destinations for a backup job can also be any number of machines or devices. Thus it is now easy to have a single set of files (documents, code or other important assets) copied to more than one location using a single job. No need to clone a job anymore!
  • Multi-Platform: As the system is written in Java, it will work with any machine for which there is a VM (this is true for the backup server and agents). The administration console can be run on either a Linux or Windows machine (when SWT, the GUI framework used for the console matures on OSX, the console will be able to run on that Mac as well)
  • Volume spanning: If any removable destination is out of space, then it is possible to request the next volume during the backup process. A good example of this is backup to multiple CD's. Plan/B supports both the spanning of single files across multiple media, and also the saving of complete files across different media. In the first case, a large file can be split across two volumes. In the second case, only complete files are written to any volume (obviously, if the file is larger than the size of the volume, it will have to be split up).
  • Flexible selection: A single job can backup whatever is deemed important to the user. The files to backup are specified by rules, which can be as simple as include everything, and complex as include all word documents, all excel spreadsheets under my docs directory, and everything NOT ending in .bak under the data directory
  • Flexible scheduler: Jobs can be run whenever you like. The current scheduling implementation takes on a form very similar to Cron, but other implementations are easily added. The important point here is that the process of deciding when a backup should be run is completely separated from anything else about the backup job. This is a change from DataArmour, where the scheduling (specifically, the weekly incremental backup job scheduling) is fixed to run on a Monday, with a full backup occurring every week. In Plan/B, user defined schedules are possible.
  • Statistics: The system emits various statistics while in operation, including current progress of various jobs, jobs in the run queue, current load, and recent logged events.


Enterprise



  • Reliable:The remote agents are resilient to network failure. If a server cannot be contacted, they will move into a 'discovery' mode until the server is available.
  • Painless installation: The system is very easy to install - just run the included windows installer and tell it what kind of install you want. All services are configured automatically.
  • Administration Console: The backup server is a separate process, which is administered via a GUI console. The console can be run from any machine, and can control and manage the settings for the backup server and any client. That means you can configure everything from one place.