Archiware P5 Synchronize

What do you like best?

With P5 Sync, I can setup an off-site backup in a few minutes. I can specify source and destination locations, across a WAN, build a schedule to run the replication on weekdays during working hours (for continuous backup) and leave it to run. Any problems i'll receive in an email and so I can largely forget about it until it tells me it requires my attention.

This product has some OS X heritage behind it so copes with Mac servers, or Apple generated data sitting on Linux or Windows servers. Can create a bootable duplicate of a running OS X system disk with it at a remote location.

Great tool for migrating a customer over to new storage. Keep them working on the old storage while P5 copies everything to the new. Everyone disconnects, one last run of the Sync and then they can connect to the new storage. Saves hours and unhappy users.

What do you dislike?

No great dislikes, P5 can create both snapshots and versioning of data on the target disk. Would be nice to see better management of versions where free disk space is used as a factor as to how many versions to store, so we don't fill up a customers disk.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I'm often looking to recommend solutions that can replicate data from OS X / Windows servers from customer offices to remote location, either data-centre or remote offices. P5 can convert the Mac data between various different AFP server formats and normalise on the target machine - nothing else can do that to my knowledge.

Customers need central management capabilities and P5's web-based admin does that nicely.

For some customers a tape backup is overkill and achieving an off-site backup by using WAN connections is always popular.