We have 1200+ servers running arcserve6.61 and 7 with various options and agents (all self-contained servers with local tape devices), and are concious that the products go out of support before the current system is made obselete and closed down.  So, are we likely to find the upgrade to Brigtstor painless ?  (jobs retained, schedules retained, databases retained, no reboots, batch files still work etc), or is it likely to be a 'balls-ache' of a task ?  Any experience of big upgrades and the effort required out there ?  Any info. gratefully received....

(PS I'm all for letting it run 'out of support' for a year or two rather than sufer the pain....)

This is more of a side comment but worth checking out. "out of support" usually means no further patches or updates will be written. In your case it sound like you have stable servers that are going to remain that way until being retired. In other words the environment on these is not going to change. That being the case it is probably not that likely there will be any need for a patch. If a problem comes up it will probably be hardware failure, corruption, permissions, or resources. So figure that into your calculations.

It's been 2 days and for us the upgrade to Brightstor Arcserve 9 has been fairly smooth.  We were running both 6.61 and 2000 prior to the upgrade and had no problems upgrading either version.  We were prompted to reboot after the upgrade from 6.61, but not 2000 (we did anyway to be safe).  

The only issues so far deal with the Alert Manager, and security using the backup agents.  The alert manager configurations didn't migrate over, so those had to be re-setup.  When backing up across servers using the SQL backup agent I found that the security needed to include the domain name, which I don't remember from before but if that's the way it was setup it didn't migrate over.

Otherwise- no headaches.  Since we haven't been upgraded for long, I'll let you know if I run into anything else.