I've been using SAN attached clients since v3.4.1, with shared drives, what is the difference here?

...is to have a vendor whom you can blame when you screw up.

rsync for windows and for linux is freely available. So pissing money away just to have someone you can blame is, to me, a strong indicator of incompetence.

Companies don't buy backup software so that they have someone to blame. I've had a quick look at the rsync web site and here are some things it can't do, that NetBackup can:

Backup the registry of a Windows box

Backup any database, without stopping the database fisrt

Backup to tape

Backup to disk then stage off to tape

Access a robotic tape library

Backup mail systems, without stopping them first

Provide automatic failover if trying to backup to a failed device

Provide browsing of recovery files by date, time, client

Hold multiple versions of a file in backup images

Backup a raw filesystem

Provide offsite duplicate media management

Provide onsite media management

Expire backups based on schedules

Bare Metal Restore

Backup over SAN to shared devices

Provide an easy to read overview of multiple backup environments from one console

Integrate with systems such as Tivoli for error reporting

Provide encrypted datastreams/encrypted storeage

These are just off the top of my head, there will be a lot more...

Hey it can't possibly be worse than Brightstor.