Alternatives to the Annual Symantec Tax

jsepeta writes: "I work as the head and only full-time IT staff for a medium-sized Medical services company. We have 7 locations and fewer than 250 employees with email addresses. We have 17 servers running a variety of services, from data storage to application hosting to MS SQL and few other databases. When looking into licensing for the current year so as to upgrade our Symantec Backup Exec, I was a bit startled to see how much we would owe them for updates; the maintenance fee for 2007 is fair ($350) but requires we REPURCHASE all options (SQL, open file access, etc), turning an annual upgrade process into a big ordeal. Are there any commercial alternatives that do as good a job backing up and recovering data for less $$$? What about freeware/Linux solutions? I'm familiar with Dantz/EMC Retrospect but even that has a pricetag I'm not certain what the owner would commit to (although $1000 for unlimited clients/servers sounds quite reasonable to me). About our environment: my company is notoriously miserly when it comes to spending money on IT, to the point that corners have been cut that I wouldn't have considered when working for companies of a similar size that have an IT budget perhaps 10x larger than ours. We're a Microsoft shop, for better or for worse, and are tied to the Windows platform based on not just on cost but also on user knowledge/experience and several applications that will run only under windows. Almost all our servers (800mhz-2.6ghz) are running under Windows 2000 which I'm hoping to upgrade/replace with Win2k3 (dual xeon 2ghz) to carry us through the next several years. Newer workstations are generally ~2ghz although older ones exist in the 500mhz range. Main app is Office 2000 and we use our ISP's email rather than Exchange. Our WAN infrastructure relies on DSL and Cable from a number of providers including Comcast (argh) but at least we're using Cisco routers. We already pay Symantec $5000 per year for antivirus protection, but adding an additional $5k to the mix for keeping our backup software up to date seems a bit extreme; sure files need to be backed up, but how much better does version 11 work over versions 10 and 9? I'm hoping to find a way to reduce our annual payments to Symantec because I'm not certain I want to stay on their "hamster wheel of progress". I am fairly unhappy with them as a company: their tech support isn't that good, updates for antivirus corporate are unreliable, products often have difficulty uninstalling and reinstalling, and they've gobbled up a number of competitors over the years that made compelling products (Central Point MacTools anyone?) Given these issues, I hate to believe that Symantec's products are the best available. What recommendations do y'all have for helping my company to kick the Symantec habit?"