Veritas Backup Exec vs. vSphere Data Protection Advanced (discontinued)

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

VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced is well suited for a thin client environment, and/or an environment that runs multiple virtual servers. It is also well suited for an environment with disaster recover requirements that require backups of everything. vSphere is very expensive, so it would probably not be a very good choice for a startup that could use a cheaper alternative in the beginning, or a physical machine environment.

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

• Maintains backups of all virtual systems for disaster recovery compliance.
• Supports plugins for backups of Microsoft systems.
• As with most VMware products vSphere is incredibly easy to use.

Incentivized

• 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

• Reports are too complex, could be made clearer.
• The interface could be simplified.
• Backups of physical servers take a very long time.

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.

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 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

CloudBacko is the only similar product that I have used, and while it worked by backing up my virtual machines to Google Drive, VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced not only backs up the virtual machines, buton databases, physical servers and more, and backs them up to a centralized location, and has 24/7 live support.

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

• Virtual machines and servers are backed up and secure
• DR compliance is met
• Multiple platforms backed up to a central location

Incentivized