Straight dump and restore works well, IF you have one of the latest versions of the software... at least then if there is a problem, Budtool won't be involved and you can address the bug right to Netapp.
dump makes for a fairly poor backup management solution. Ever try to maintain ~30 filers with around 600GB? We kinda found that our home grown scripts we're scaling to where we needed to be and found it increasinly harder to manage the whole mess.
I'm not sure why you'd be having so much trouble with Budtool, though.
Quiet honestly I'm not convinced that PDC has ever actually tested BudTool in a real world setup. This has been an incredible sore point we us because the solution that I ended up recommending to my boss was one that both Network Appliance and PDC said would work.
But enough ranting on that (I know we've got many tickets open with both PDC and Network Appliance and I'm sure our sales guy can fill you in on all our grief with backups) - I was mainly fishing for solutions others are working on.
- mz
-- matthew zeier -- mrz@3com.com -- 3Com EWD Engineering -- 408/764-8420 ...................................................................... "Y el mundo se mueve, mas rapido y mejor." - Fey