"The reliability of disk-to-disk backup also means more consistent completion times. There's no morning rush to see what hasn't backed up. We can now meet our backup window rather than constantly missing it," he said.

Networker also does compression at the server end which has yielded big transfer savings.

"Now we can get a 60-gigabyte database down in an hour and a half," Morton said.

"We can recover it just as fast, which is incredibly important for our users."

With Networker 7.2 in use now, Morton said the university plans to upgrade to version 7.3 allowing RMIT to archive to tape from a larger number of disks simultaneously.