Paragon A&R Server: Real-World Scenario Questions

[StanGuy]

I'm evaluating Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Server edition for many Windows 2003 servers. I'm only trialling software on 2 servers at the moment and I have just finished trialling Acronis (And yes, I did remove it properly using the idiotic utility available from Acronis support) which had a good workflow, wizards, scheduling and DRP generation, however, the console and agents were async and information was never up to date, and when it came to doing a backup it fell over and flat out didn't work, eventually it led to system instability and corruption. My desired backup plan is fairly simple, full backup on Saturday night, differential every other day of the week, kept until overwritten the next cycle. Preferably local then replicated offsite to network share but could do it directly offsite to network share.

I have some questions about Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Server:

• Why must I make a full backup before I can design additional tasks in the wizards? Other backup products can design an entire plan from nothing, all at once.
• Why does "Cyclic Backup" only do one partition at a time? Why can't I just select entire hard drives and multiple of them? This forces me to instead manually craft schedules with combinations of full and incremental and then I have to manually script the clean up parameters. Other backup products can easily achieve what I need in a few minutes using their wizards.
• I cannot get Scheduled backup tasks to work whilst a user is not logged in, and yes the scheduled task is correctly configured to use the right credentials for a user with the right permissions. The task starts but the backup is never actually started and I never know why.
• Why isn't there a normal log of tasks? stubact.log is too verbose, I don't always want hard drive and partition diagnostics information, I want log information about how my scheduled tasks went which is as easy to read as the email notification. I want that saved as a file somewhere directly from Paragon not just as a email.
• How do I configure Paragon to email me when a scheduled backup starts?
• Is there any easy way to do off-site replication or am I going to have to script something from scratch myself?
• Which is more efficient (bandwidth and time), backing up locally and doing off-site replication to network share or backing up directly off-site to a network share?

As much as I appreciate the scripting and white box design, I'm disappointed at how much work and scripting is involved to get a normal use-case backup plan up and running. Why am I buying backup software when it seems I'm having to do everything myself anyway? If I wanted to spend so much time scripting and designing I'd just try making something myself using various binary diff, compression, VSS and other utilities. I just want a multiple disk image backup solution that doesn't require alot of work to setup and maintain and has an easy restoration process so my DRP isn't some big thick booklet.

Can anyone help me?