This morning I was privileged to have a private preview to the upcoming Idera Pointbackup Enterprise backup and restore solution.  Expected to be released to public beta in the next two weeks, I was really impressed by what I saw.  The emphasis for this product was on keeping the interface extremely simple and easy to understand which still offering a very rich feature set under the covers.  The Pointbackup is easy to use, doesn't require a server installation, and takes advantage of Idera's significant expertise in SQL Server backup and restore.  Pointbackup opens to a nice Today status window which rolls up recent job histories and reports on available disk space.  I really like the available disk space meter - I've got personal experience with enterprise backup tools that tell you that there is insufficient disk or tape space by simply failing the jobs.  This simple little gauge allows someone to take proactive action before a critical backup job runs out of disk space.

Idera's Pointbackup has a great interface for scheduling backups or even performing an on-demand backup of granularly selectable content.  However, the Restore screen is more telling about the power of the solution.  First, you have the ability to search your backup sets to find specific content by date.  I love that feature - makes it easy to work with when a user is really looking for a single important bit of content and doesn't really need for an entire site collection or site to be restored.  You have the ability to perform an in-place restore which restores the content to its original location in the farm.  You have the ability to perform an out of place restore, which lets you select where you'd like the content place, even across web applications.  You also have the ability to perform a local restore.  If all you need to do is restore a single document or a small set of documents to disk so they can be e-mailed to someone, local restore is for you!  Another great set of options is the Restore vs. Quick Restore.  The big difference here is that a Restore will bring back metadata while Quick Restore simply recovers the files.  The screenshot below hints at how you can select which backup set to restore from and the options available to you for managing that restore.

I think Idera is really on the right track with the upcoming Pointbackup application.  I'm looking forward to putting this tool in the hands of my customers and helping them manage their backups and restores in an extremely simple yet powerful way.  The administrator's tool is easy to use and easy to read at a glance.  I can't tell you how important that is to busy administrators.  I don't have a screenshot of it, but there is also a self-service restore web part which lets site owners restore their own content from the backup sets.  Delegation of authority - another great time saver.

FYI - I've also seen their Pointadmin tool