sarcasmPaul, I can't believe you doubt the true intentions of my SW
vendor in promoting BackupExec. And I thought he's change in
direction was down purely to his desire to constantly strive towards
providing us with the best software for our business./sarcasm

Seriously, thanks for the input. I'll take the comments on board.

Our "beef" with ArcServe was only really that we didn't understand it.
The cryptic error messages that it comes up with certainly never
helped. When it used to break and not run and then we would fix it
the next day, it would immediately fire into life and start on the
previous nights backup, which meant that it ran the pre execution task
of shutting down the DB's and booting all the users off. OK, when
you're ready for this and cater for it happening but frustrating (and
embarrasing) when you're not.

After 5 years we're used to ArcServe, we almost actually like it

John