The best backup software available
January 09, 2020
The best backup software available
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Veeam Backup & Replication
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication
Veeam Backup & Replication is used across two of my company's sites currently, and covers our requirement for backup retention, as well as providing a quick and simple method for data recovery when required. It is used to back up both virtual and physical machines across our estate, and backs up to both disk and tape media.
- Virtual machine backups, as it can recover on a VM level or a file level, and is compatible with all of the OS & applications we run on our network, it basically fulfils every backup requirement we have
- Restores are very fast and easy; it allows you to browse the entire contents of a server within the Veeam software, so you can manually chose which files/folders you want, and it also gives you multiple restore options. You can also open the files from the restore window, which allows you to verify that you have what you need before doing the restore
- Licensing; they recently moved to 'instance based licensing' rather than the previous socked based one. I've found that even their support team don't seem to fully understand how the licenses work, and it means that if you have an existing socket based license, you can no longer increase your existing license, as the new ones aren't compatible. We've found that this has meant that we are unable to increase the number of physical agent licenses that we had previously, as we would have to re license our entire server.
- It has reduced the time taken to configure and maintain the backup jobs considerably over our previous solutions, and also the time taken to do restores has dramatically decreased, freeing up the IT staff to do other tasks
- It isn't too resource intensive, so even when running multiple jobs to multiple locations, the server hasn't needed to be given a ridiculously high spec, freeing up resources for other servers and applications
As a rough estimate, between 50-100. Veeam Backup & Replication protects every server on 3 of our domains, spread over 3 sites, as well as a number of physical machines. It is more than we originally planned to, but only due to expansion; our plan was always to use it to back up all of our resources, but the number of resources since the Veeam BR implementations has greatly increased.
We have no experience with cloud recovery, as all of our systems are hosted and stored internally (security reasons).
We don't currently use most of these features, however we have plans to begin to utilise them in the next 12-18 months.
It's far lower maintenance, installation is much simpler, updates are also much less disruptive. I've found that the maintenance involved in running Veeam is far lower than it was with either of the other products we had in previously, and error messages within the software are far more useful; you can normally work out what the issue is as soon as you read them, rather than having to trawl through endless forums to find a clue. It also integrates brilliantly with vmware, allowing backup jobs to be much more easily configured by use of VM tags for example.