Acronis Advanced Backup (or formerly Acronis Backup Cloud) is a Backup-as-a-Service solution for Service Providers, available to add to Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud.
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Veritas Backup Exec
Score 6.8 out of 10
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Veritas Backup Exec is a backup and disaster recovery solution. It works in virtual, physical, and multi-cloud environments and integrates with several third-party software releases and applications.
Gravit8 was originally making use of BackupAgent - which was then purchased by Acronis, redesigned, and rebranded. Since this acquisition, we have seen constant improvements and feel that Acronis Backup Cloud is in a league of its own.
Acronis is a great solution and provides a flexible amount of ways to backup and restore data. For software, it competes directly with Carbonite, ShadowProtect, Veeam, and Veritas. Most of these solutions are agent based and require licenses for each. Acronis does a great …
I believe Acronis has the easiest interface to control backups and restores. The backup solution that didn't work the best for us was Symantec Backup. The other backup solutions (Unitrends, Barracuda,and Veeam) have similar backup features as Acronis and are recommended. …
The endpoint protection is fantastic. Being able to recover a single file on the fly has saved many customers hours of frustration. Long term recovery of O365 data has worked well. I bit more difficult but not Acronis Advanced Backup issue, it has been MS issues. Nothing beats on premise backup / recovery speed but, when it is not available, Acronis Advanced Backup gets the job done for bare metal recovery.
Backup Exec works well generally in most environments or situations. The licensing can potentially be a nightmare, but manageable if you have a decent reseller. Backing up and restoring from physical tapes which is not all that common is not as reliable as when backing up and restoring from datastores that reside on hard drives or digital media. It does a good job with large or small backup jobs. Backing up and managing SQL backups requires additional licenses and be a bit clunky. If you are very careful (which you should be anyway) and document as you build these backups you will get better at managing them. Regarding a virtual environment, I have limited experience in that arena, but have done it. Backup Exec can backup VMware environments, but honestly we moved to Unitrends to backup our VM's and are much happier with the backup process. However, restoring a VM in Unitrends can be tedious compared to Backup Exec.
Quick Virtualization. Acronis can virtualize most systems and get you back up in 15-30 minutes.
Encryption of Backups. You own the encryption key, and Acronis doesn't - so not even Acronis employees can get into your cloud data. Encryption meets all HIPAA requirements for data protection.
Easy to resell. You can create accounts for individuals outside of the company to allow them access to their backup console. It's very easy to set up, and clients are happy with how easy it is to use.
Manage agent based backups - It is easy to schedule and monitor backups. Verifying backups is done for all jobs. Backup performance is excellent.
Provide a wide ranging contingent of backup options - Despite providing a dizzying array of backup options, it is easy to schedule individual or recurring jobs.
Integrates well with our Active Directory - Restoring even individual Active Directory objects is possible.
They do not sell their product directly, so a reseller is needed - or third party website to process payments for them in order to download the product suite.
They have done away with stand-alone software purchases, and have moved to a yearly subscription-based model. It's affordable, but you never truly "own" the software now.
Could provide better license management from an inventory perspective. How many licenses do I have?.. etc.
When Backup Exec backs up itself it should not select iSCSI backup targets by default. The result is recursive data backup ending in the loss of storage capacity.
The cost savings we realized from moving to this software has us hooked - it does everything we need it to do on a very high level (virtualization, for example) and is very low cost for us.
This software is a mess in my brutally honest opinion. I've spent more time babysitting this software while backing up 20 servers than I did with Veeam backing up 600+. I've had multiple jobs run fine for weeks at a time that just randomly fail out of the blue for seemingly no reason whatsoever. There's no intuitive way to chain jobs, so automation becomes somewhat more problematic if certain jobs depend on other jobs. The forever incremental feature feels tacked on since the merge operation merges all your incremental jobs into the most recent backup and doesn't have the option set a limit on how long to keep your point in time restores.
It can do a lot of things on paper and sounds terrific, but in practice it doesn't do any of them well. It can easily be sold to non-technical minds and C-levels, but of all the backup solutions I've used in the last 15 years of my career, Backup Exec is easily the least fault tolerant. Unless this software is a sunk cost and you're on a shoestring budget, I recommend almost anything else. Jobs fail often with obscure error codes and the KB articles in the Veritas support portal are a mess. Within 30 days of a fresh deployment I've logged more tickets with their support than I did in 3 years with Veeam.
We seldom make use of Acronis support, but when we have they have been brilliant. All our engineers are Acronis certified, if they not able to resolve an issue, we touch base with our local Acronis supplier, Synapsys, who resolve issues 90% of the time.
In the few instances of having to contact support, our overall outcome was always good. They would have received a better score if the wait time was less, but I attribute this to the timing of support calls - it was during the previous owner's time. We have not had to open a support ticket since Veritas Backup Exec took the product back over.
We went with Acronis Backup Cloud because we're able to backup all platforms, not just PCs. And the price was good when it comes to all those options. It's a hard sell to clients, but when explained properly, the understand the cost of a good solution. It's like having good car insurance.
If your company is looking at changing solutions or currently does not have any, Veritas Backup Exec is the way to go. Do yourself a favor and try the 60 day trial, you won't be disappointed! Very simple to use and has a great GUI, much better than what the competition has to offer.
Backups by their very nature are difficult to quantify when it comes to ROI. Any monies spent should be seen more as insurance . If you never have to claim on it then that is the best outcome. Backup Exec gives you comfort that you can meet any downtime recovery targets set by your business and this is how to benchmark your solution.
Conduct regular DR tests and your this will be your ROI.
