Arcserve Backup is a storage management solution from Arcserve, formerly of CA Technologies before Arcserve's divestiture (July 2014). It utilizes magnetic tape storage backup as part of its storage management offering.
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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.
To be succinct, we have used Veeam B&R for a number of years, against our VM environment, and we have yet to find anything that tops it. However, if you have physical machines in your environment still, then Arcserve is a great option, especially for the replication aspect.
Arcserve UDP is fast, reducing our backup window from +20 hours to less than an hour. Arcserve UDP also has proven itself when restoring databases and files to to the same location or alternate locations quickly and efficiently. We have also successfully created "synthetic" …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Arcserve Backup
Backup Exec, Yosemite, Acronis. Arcserver is the best of the bunch.
Veritas Backup Exec is very comparable to Unitrends and in some areas is easier to use. The license side of Veritas Backup Exec is much more difficult to manage compared to Unitrends. Unitrends seems to be a much smoother solutions to protect virtual environments. Restoring …
Essentially we chose Backup Exec because we were familiar with it's config and interface. Both Acronis and Arcserve provided the same or similar features, but came in at a higher price. We also looked at hosted backup services and found them extremely expensive. We adopted …
Arcserve UDP is fully suited for small to large size environments that need complete data protection solutions with the ability to run the fastest backups, replications, instant VM and DR.
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.
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.
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.
Arcserve UDP provides our organization lots of benefits and it is much more than a simple backup and restore solution. We use it for cross platform DR, storage agnostic replications, DR solution instead of VMware SRM and more.
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.
Arcserve Backup support is usually very good. Their chat is usually able to fix most general issues, but will escalate more in depth issues to technical engineers that call you back. Their product knowledge is really good and usually resolve issues promptly.
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 use Veeam Backup and Replication at our larger sites where Vmware Virtualization is being used and is our product of choice in this venue. When it comes to our smaller sites, nothing is more affordable and reliable than Arcserve Backup.
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.
Deploying Arcserve UDP with the "copy-to-tape" option allowed us to reuse well over 50 LTO5 tapes used by our previous backup solution. Further, we extended data retention on site (maintaining monthly backups on disk) as well as extending off site data retention on tape.
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.