Yesterday's Backup Solution Today
September 17, 2020

Yesterday's Backup Solution Today

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Veritas Backup Exec

We use backup exec to backup our mostly virtual server environment.

Pros

  • It works sometimes.

Cons

  • Can't intuitively chain backup jobs.
  • Forever incremental backup feature is limited and basically useless, feels tacked on.
  • Storage based compression and de-duplication are awkward to manage compared to other backup solutions.
  • Convoluted licensing model.
  • Poor fault tolerance.
  • Already looking at replacement solutions 90 days after purchase.
Backup Exec was the cheapest out of all the other options we were looking at.

Communication with support is generally poor. I'm frankly not sure they even read the tickets at times. I work in Asia and they're calling me near midnight because they didn't check my contact times. It usually takes 2-3 days just to start troubleshooting. Tickets drag out for weeks and you'll be constantly asked to rerun the job and submit logs with no real feedback. To get any kind of serious response you basically have to become the squeaky wheel and get your tickets elevated to S1 or S2.
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.

Do you think Veritas Backup Exec delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Veritas Backup Exec's feature set?

No

Did Veritas Backup Exec live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Veritas Backup Exec go as expected?

No

Would you buy Veritas Backup Exec again?

No

Veeam Backup & Replication, Quest Rapid Recovery (formerly AppAssure), Datto
Backup Exec probably works well if you're only backing up a small number of servers (around 20 at the most) locally. This seems to be the only scenario where its at least capable of doing its job.

Any kind of serious enterprise is going to want to avoid this software like the plague. Deploying this across multiple sites requires fully licensed servers at each site and a second management server at the primary site. Beyond that, running multiple backup jobs can be problematic as, per Veritas support, there is no native way to chain separate backup jobs.

Veritas Backup Exec Feature Ratings

Data Center Backup
1.0
Universal recovery
Not Rated
Instant recovery
Not Rated
Recovery verification
Not Rated
Business application protection
Not Rated
Multiple backup destinations
Not Rated
Incremental backup identification
1
Backup to the cloud
Not Rated
Deduplication and file compression
1
Snapshots
1
Flexible deployment
Not Rated
Management dashboard
1
Platform support
1
Retention options
1
Encryption
Not Rated

Using Veritas Backup Exec

7 - Information Technology department.
1 - A lot of patience and an ability to figure things out yourself.
  • Backups.
  • Data recovery.
  • Disaster Recovery.
  • We are planning on moving on from Backup Exec.
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.

Evaluating Veritas Backup Exec and Competitors

  • Price
Price was ultimately the deciding factor for management. Backup Exec doesn't have the greatest reputation among the Sysadmin community, but it came in cheaper than all the other options. Unfortunately this was because of a licensing mistake made by the implementation planner, in part due to Veritas' convoluted licensing model. Ultimately the price was not much cheaper than the next cheapest solution we evaluated.
Ultimately, this product was heavily favored by an influential staff member. Given a more fair shake this likely would have not have been chosen based on a more objective analysis.

Veritas Backup Exec Implementation

It was pretty straightforward.
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal
  • There was a mistake made with licensing, making full implementation impossible.

Veritas Backup Exec Support

ProsCons
Good followup
Quick Initial Response
Slow Resolution
Less knowledgeable
Problems left unsolved
Not kept informed
Escalation required
Need to explain problems multiple times
Support doesn't seem to care
Yes - It was basically ignored since I found a workaround.
No, but I can give at least a dozen examples of their support being terrible.

Using Veritas Backup Exec

ProsCons
Like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
Cumbersome
Feel nervous using
  • Setting up basic jobs are pretty easy.
  • Features like compression and deduplication are folder based and not job based.
  • Running multiple jobs nightly is difficult without the option to chain jobs.

Comments

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