We're quite happy here using dump, restore, and (nowadays) NDMP.
I wish all of our customers were like you! Life would be much easier.
Backup seems to be difficult in large part because different people have such different needs and desires. I know that our priorities and roadmap will never make everyone happy, but I can share at least some of the thinking that's gone into our decisions.
This seems like marketing-deal-driven engineering.
I would call it "customer-driven" engineering, although it's certainly true that customer requests are often delivered via marketing.
I love NDMP, but the fact is that Legato is a very strong player in the backup market, and many big companies want support for native Legato backup protocols.
Customer feedback to us indicates that backup is one of the single most important issues on the filer (and probably on *any* file server), so we have prioritized backup above many other issues.
We have concluded that there is probably no "silver bullet" for backup. Different companies have chosen different corporate standards, and they have different feature requirements. As a result, we can't rely on a single solution (like NDMP or dump/restore), but must support a wide variety of solutions.
I'm worried that these additions ... encourage Legato to kill off BudTool.
I don't know Legato's plans with respect to BudTool, but I do know that they have been getting quite a bit of pressure about NDMP (thanks everyone!), and I believe they are taking it seriously.
Dave