Would you recommend Backup Exec?

[LissaB]

Hello,

I took over as CIO of a smallish company in November. I work with a consultant who was full time here before I started. I was told that backups were being done in all departments on a regular basis and have now found out that I was given false information.

I need to come up with a backup strategy for the company. It needs to be reliable and automated- other than changing the tape.

We have a Surestore T4i in a Windows NT 4.0 server. Most of our critical data is stored on this server.

I am happy to tell you I ran a full backup last night using Windows NT backup, but I want to give them a better solution. That said, do you recommend Backup Exec? Why did you choose it over Arcserve?

Thank you so much for your help.

Lissa

 

[Guest_imported]

No I wouldn't unless I hated you .... the upgrades are a joke as far a pricing goes and its just lame software.

You want support !?? START PAYING!!!!!$$$$$$$$$$

 

[enc]

hi lissa we are both a reseller of ArcServe and Veritas, we usually recommend arcserve if our client is using netware os, and veritas if they are running windows nt/2000.

 

[polymath5]

I have been using BE for several years, no complaints. Sure you might pay for support, but that's part of biz.

ArcServe has NO support worthy of the name.

Go with BE, I don't think you will regret it.

 

[Msharkey]

I would recommend such.

Matt

 

[Zelandakh]

Been using BE for many years. Its not the cheapest solution, but its fairly bullet proof, the support is excellent and the web site will solve most problems.

Would wholeheartedly recommend it.

 

[Guest_imported]

You're nuts if you don't go with BE. Arcserver sucks!! You'll be trouncing thru logs all day, every day. I work for a large consulting firms with almost 100 engineers. You wont find one of us to recommend Arcserve. We've made a company policy to recommend BE. If it doesn't work, you don't know what you're doing. GO WITH BE!!

I can give you 3 different cases where Arcserve has failed me on a full restore of a server. It won't catalog it's own freakin proprietary database to allow you to do a full restore. I worked with one of their senior engineers for 6 weeks one time to try to get data back. No go. Not to mention BE is so much more user friendly. Don't you have enough things to work on from day to day? Don't let the backup be a monster. You heard it here first if you choose Arcserve. Good luck.

 

[Guest_imported]

I've used Backup Exec for years. I've never used ARCServe. Backup Exec has worked well for me.

 

[Meldric]

Backup Exec all the way. Support does cost some, but that is just business as usual.

Roger

 

[ashleym]

We used to resell Arcserve until CA dropped free tech support for their resellers. Around the same time they moved their support for Arserve to India. I have nothing against India or people who live there but the level of support just went down the drain and we encountered techs on the phone we could barely understand.

Arcserve is not a bad product when it works and its reporting is richer then BE. Ater CA upgraded Arcserve to version 2000 we could not get the Exchange agent to work, even with support on the phone.

Shortly after that we dropped CA alltoegether and went with Symantec for Av and Veritas for backups.

BE is easier to work with and support is top notch.

Just my experiences.

Ashleym

 

[RiosCNE]

I used Ca's ArcServe and ArcServeIt for about 5 years and found an enourmous amount of problems starting with dirvers for the DLT tape drive and faulty software paks and not being able to restore some data, not to mention simply not backing up even when the right tapes were in the drives. The last straw was when it abended my server because it did not fully mount and inventory the tapes.

I have now switched to Backup Exec and have some issues, but not nearly the number of issues I had with ArcServe. We now backup about 120 gig every night from our once 4 gig 10 years ago.

 

[Guest_imported]

You should take a look at your backup strategy in the context of leading into Disaster Recovery. It seems that the main concern would be to have a process that was quick easy, and you could be assured that it takes place.

Tape is a 40 yr. old technology and there have been a lot of advancements in the marketplace. The biggest thing with backups are restores.

I recommend that you take a look at electronic vaulting. The backups are automated and offsite instantly. File level restores take minutes and in case of a disaster, downtime is greatly reduced.

 

[johnny99]

I would buy BackupExec if what you have is a small shop.
But what is small?
When I look at it I don't think so much in GB and TB but more in what the company needs.
You could have 10 TB of data and the company doesn't need that much. You can also have a company that has less then 250 GB but have a lot of demands.

In a small shop where features is not a must and you want to keep the "know-how" level at a minimum I would look into BackupExec (if what you are running is WIN2K and NT4)

If you demands are high and/or you have a mixed enviroment look at Veritas NetBackup. What I have seen about version 4.5 (should come out in april) it looks great.
The price for you shop to change from BackupExec to NetBackup Datacenter was something like factor 3-4, but we will go for NetBackup anyway.

At the moment we have around 500 GB of data and everything is on WIN2K or NT4 servers and we also use Exchange 5.5 and SQL 6.5, 7.0 and SQL 2000.

If you have databases like Oracle and Informix on a Unix platform be carefull when Veritas give you the prices for that. The price for things like Oracle and SAP is wild.

On the tech. side we use StorageTek for almost everything that has something to do with storage. The disksubsystem is a SVA9500 (newest model is call V960) and tapes are STK 9940 in a L180 robot.
SAN switches are Brocade Silkworm but we got them from StorageTek. We also will get NetBackup from StorageTek.

We are a small shop but the demands are high for a shop our size.

/johnny

 

[4fili]

Hi
I usually recommend Bexec if the customer have only win nt/2000 servers. I have had a lot of trouble with NetWare servers....
The feature i like in Bexec is the disaster Recovery for NT/2000...it work very fine.

Bye
franz

 

[Primagassie]

I have worked with backup exec and Arcserve for the last 5 years or so. Arcserve was up until the advent of backup exec pretty much the standard for Novell servers. If you have Novell go for Arcserve. I would recommend Backup Exec for the windows environment however (NT / 2000). Both Arcserve and Backup Exec have their faults but restoring from tape is a dream with BE compared with Arcserve. Also the notification setup is pretty simple and organised in Backup Exec compared with Arcserve. The support site knowlegde base has solutions for 95% of problems and there is still free e-mail support for other troubles (which I've used once in 5 years to my satisfaction). You still need quite a bit of insight into nt-based rights and trusts etc if you use backup exec in a large environment, but that is more of a microsoft hangover than a Veritas problem. The thing that put me off Arcserve for NT was that I've twice done a total system restore with Arcserve for NT. Both times things went wrong. Arcserve didn't instill the trust I still have in Backup Exec.

 

[ArcserveDemon]

Lissa

Arcserve really is bad. I support it 24 x 7 in Netware and it does keep me in a job so I should have no complaints. Looking after 1 backup is almost a full time job (if you want to actually be able to restore)!. Looking after 100+ servers requires superhuman abilities.

In the same company we use BE and I have heard very few compaints on NT. The program is a nightmare of unbelievable proportions on Netware but its about the best that there is so we tend to be stuck with it.

I tried an eval of Arcserve for NT at home (also tried AS NW) I have to say that both flavours are absolutely useless. Practically every failure that has required a restore has left me with lost data!!.

I now use Win98 backup as its the best I have found. (Strangely Win2k backup keeps stalling on me and saying that the target disk is full when dumping to file!???).

Hope this helps save you from tears!.

Mark