Do you rely on your road warriors to backup their laptops? Is that working out for you or are you just blaming the victim when they're machines are lost, stolen or just break down after being sent through the airport X-ray machine one time too many? Once you accept the fact that users, especially Sr. executives won't take any action at all to backup their data on a regular basis you'll start looking for an automated solution. Atempo's Live Backup has been that automated solution for Windows for years. With Version 3.2 Atempo is expanding client support to the fast growing Mac and Linux platforms.

Once you set up Live Backup on a Windows server in your data center and install the clients to your users it runs continuously in the background on their machines saving their work at the block level. If they're connected to your network the changes are sent to the Live Backup server in real time. If they're at 35,000 feet enjoying the flight in the corporate Gulfstream it journals the changes to a dedicated partition on their hard drive and uploads it when they connect.

When the waste product strikes the air movement device, and we all know it will, users can restore files themselves through the Live Backup client UI and IT staff can doa bare metal restore to a new machine when the Exec VP drops his laptop into the Zambezi.

Atempo says a Live Backup server can support up to 10,000 users, assuming of course it has enough disk space.

Along with Mac and Linux, specifically the SUSE and Red Hat distros, support 3.2 adds multi-tiered administration that can enable departmental IT staff to manage their user groups and get reports. Atempo is also looking to use this feature to sign up solution providers for online backup.

Live Backup for Linux and the Mac should be available in July.