Arctera Backup Exec vs. CodeTwo Backup

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.

Incentivized

CodeTwo Backup for Office 365 is the rare type of software that works for both SMB's and larger businesses. The built in backup and restore features of Office 365 are too rudimentary and PowerShell based to allow lower level IT people the ability to use them. CodeTwo opens the door to allowing day to day helpdesk employees the ability to assist customers with restore needs. As with anything Office 365, there is a limit on how well is works with the system and CodeTwo does not backup Archive mailboxes so if your organization is one that uses them extensively, you should go into the deal realizing that archive restores would still need to use the built in MS offerings

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Backup all the information in Microsoft Exchange mail accounts on premise and also Microsoft 365.
• Backup all the information in Microsoft Sharepoint / OneDrive accounts on premise and also Microsoft 365.
• Restoring all the data in Microsoft Sharepoint / OneDrive accounts on premise and also Microsoft 365 without any complications.
• Restoring all the data in Microsoft Exchange mail accounts on premise and also Microsoft 365 without any complications.

• 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.
• I'm struggling to come up with another con.

Incentivized

• None offhand
• This is really a solid product

Incentivized

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.

Great product. Easy to use, does the job without extra overhead.

Incentivized

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.

The software is very user-friendly, easy to install and configure and the user interface is very intuitive and easy to navigate throughout. We are am able to get restores of our Microsoft Data (on premise and cloud) easily without any hussle. With the help of the marvelous CodeTwo support team we've been able to overcome any obstacles we encountered.

The weekly error on save needs a manual reload from me. The SDR can't restore the virtual machine of hyperV during a test.

Incentivized

No problem for this point it is in the average.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It was pretty straightforward.

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.

Incentivized

Code two works well and is pretty easy to use. As long as you have the storage space for the backups it works great. If you lose that local storage however then you've lost those backups. Allowing for me to offload those backups to cloud storage (Azure, AWS) would make this a really good solution.

Incentivized

We only use it on the on-premise version on a single site.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It allows us the ability to maintain some lower level IT employees and lower the load on level 3 support...lessening our overhead salaries.
• The ease to use interfaces speeds up the ability to restore data which in turn gives our users a heads up on doing what they need to do without having to wait for fixes/restores.
• The cost of a lost file(s) is almost immeasurable. Having this extra layer of protection is such a benefit, we often mention it to our customers as a benefit of working with us.

Incentivized