"We would also like to offer a free month 's trail period for new UNIX users of the service, on a first-come, first-served basis, since we are limited in how many new clients we can handle per day," said Rosemary Evanoff, head of CIS. "This free trial period, which we need to limit to users with a maximum of 70 gigabytes of data, will allow potential users of the service to assess the cost of the service for their specific situation since it can be hard to estimate the volumes of full and daily incremental backups and the impact of data compression and increased ability to be selective about which files need to be backed up."

CIS has also decided to extend the free-one-month-trial offer to Macintosh users. This will allow CIS to test Veritas for Macs and also give Mac users an opportunity to compare the new service with the current Macdumps backup service. Again, the introductory offer for Mac users will also be on a first-come, first-served basis.

To request a free month's trial, please send an email to backupmaster@lbl.gov including a contact name and phone number, the name of the system, current version of operating system and approximate size of the data to be backed up.

UNIX users with very large amounts of data - more than 70 gigabytes - can also take advantage of a similar "get-acquainted offer," but will have to pay a small fee for the necessary additional storage media. For details, contact backupmaster@lbl.gov.

CIS will also be testing Veritas as a backup for Windows systems over the next few months.

For more information about Veritas, read previous articles from Computing News:

New Backup Service Now Available to UNIX Workstation Users

Cost of Backups for UNIX Systems to Drop by 20 Percent - and More - on March 1.