Autonomy Connected Backup - anyone using it on Mac clients?

[donmontalvo]

In the spirit of leveraging existing infrastructure, we want to start testing Autonomy Connected Backup on Macs.

This used to be an Iron Mountain product, sold off to Autonomy:

http://backup.ironmountain.com

Their latest version as of today is 8.6.2 and apparently it does not yet support Mountain Lion.

external image link

Is anyone using this in their environment? I know it is very widely used (client list is staggering) on the PC side, but I haven't seen much on the usual forums on the Mac client.

Anyone using it? Can you offer any feedback?

PS, I added "Autonomy" and "Connected Backup" to the third party section...unfortnately the popup menus don't yet list it (I guess JAMF are screening entries?).

Thanks,
Don

[jarednichols · Accepted solution]

I don't use it currently but did at my last job. They were in the process of transitioning it to Autonomy when I was there. I'm sort of surprised to hear that they haven't qualified it for ML yet as they were very good about the Lion-supported release.

[nkalister · Accepted solution]

I tested their Lion client and had no issues. i liked it quite a bit, in fact, but we were forced to go with another solution for non-technical reasons.

[MikeF · Accepted solution]

We are currently using it and I am not to happy with it. Out results so far is it will usually complete with errors though if outlook is open. However we are testing a new version now and it seems to be better It did finish my backup this morning with Outlook open. I am using version 8.6.2.2 HF4

[jarednichols · Accepted solution]

Huh interesting article. I think it's a shame that Iron Mountain let their Connected Backup go. It's actually a good product once you wrap your head around it. I think they really just want to be in the physical document business.

[donmontalvo]

@makingtortillas thanks for posting the link to your husband's thread, interesting information.

@jhbush1973 not sure if you guys updated to 8.8.4, but if you did, do you still get backup errors when Outlook 2011/2016 is open?

@jarednichols had a valid point, why bother to backup Outlook 2011/2016 data. Unfortunately not all companies have an email retention policy forbidding local archiving in Outlook 2011/2016. And Microsoft haven't provided a management option to dis-allow. So for legal reasons, some companies have a mandate to backup the local archives. Which, unfortunately, is all flat files, inter-mingled with local cache of Exchange email.

Don

[jhbush]

@donmontalvo we are using 8.8.3 and I believe the issue is resolved, but a new client is expected shortly from what my HP TAM told me.

[donmontalvo]

8.8.4 is out and includes embedded Java. Not that it makes it any less sucky. CrashPlan is still a much better solution.

[donmontalvo]

Anyone know what is the proper method to kill the Connected Backup process?

The usual loop script doesn't seem to work, complains that Connected Backup process is not running when it is.

We found that killing /Applications/Autonomy/Connected Backup/Connected Backup.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaAppLauncher kills the Connected Backup process.

But I seem to remember that could cause problems if any other Java application is running that users JavaAppLauncher.

Thoughts?

[donmontalvo]

Circling back, it is indeed the JavaAppLauncher process we need to kill, as per the vendor.