Well, things are looking up. All the backup jobs worked last night... And I can restore data to the same server it came from, but not any other. Strange? Maybe. I am assuming it might be a 'feature' of brightstor - for security. Since all the backups worked, and all the merges went flawlessly, and I can restore, I won't worry quite so much about the backups. Hopefully the trend will continue, with the system purging correctly on schedule and staying stable instead of getting corrupted after only a few days.