Veritas Backup Exec Reviews

It's very easy to administer so the IT team doesn't need a dedicated backup administrator. An IT admin can manage the backups. It's easy to deploy and doesn't require a lot of resources on the client machine. 

So the customer doesn't need to purchase high-performance servers or enterprise-level solutions. This reduces costs for the client in terms of hardware and IT management resources. It also integrates with virtual machines and environments, allowing customers to back up their databases and applications.

Backup Exec has improved data recovery times during critical operations for our customers.

The resources are generally easy to manage and don't require much network bandwidth. Restores are also easier and take up less bandwidth and time. This is good for the industry, as it helps them get their critical servers back online quickly.

We rely heavily on the image-level backup functionality for simplified disaster recovery. Many of our clients have physical infrastructure, so this protection is very important to them. 

Taking an image-level backup and restoring it is very easy in Backup Exec, which helps us significantly. 

Additionally, we have virtual infrastructure, so restoring virtual machine systems from backups is also very easy. These two features are most crucial for us.

From a licensing perspective, there's room for improvement. Previously, we had a license that could support both virtualization and databases within virtual machines. This meant a single license would cover both. 

Now, with the simplified license model, it only covers VMs. So, if there's one thing that could be definitely improved, it's the licensing model.

We have this product for four years now. 

It's a good product for SMB-level clients. 

So, we don't use features like replication much. We have SMB customers, and they can't afford the high bandwidth lines needed. We typically use it for on-site backup recovery only. 

However, we are aware of the repeatability offered by Backup Exec. Although we haven't implemented it yet, if needed, we can refer to the documentation. We've heard the application is good, but we haven't tested it ourselves.  

We are an IT solution provider company, and we offer backup solutions with Veritas Backup Exec, Veeam, and Commvault.

The solution is primarily used for the usual database backups, virtual machine backups, and file backups.

I can't say there’s any significant difference with other solutions. It's just a backup solution for me.

It’s pretty standard. There is no significant difference for me.

We needed something that offered backups at a lower price, which this delivers.

The implementation is straightforward.

Other solutions have Kubernetes-specific solutions within them. This doesn’t. In the future, we may need the product to have that, however, in my environment, I don't have Kubernetes, so for my use, it is not necessary.

It may be useful if it was easier to access.

The reports could be made in an easier way.

I’ve been using the solution for the last three years.

It is stable. That is no issue in our environment. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze. It’s reliable, and the performance is good.

It has agents. I didn't need any strategy in terms of scaling. When I need to add an extra device, I just install the new agents. I didn't force the limits, like Backup Exec. I didn't force the limit, so I can’t speak to the maximum expansion capabilities.

We have four people using the solution. They are system admins.

We do not plan to increase usage anytime soon.

We don’t have much recent experience in technical support. We haven’t used them in the last 12 months or the past three years. When we did deal with them, they were okay. They were helpful.

Neutral

I've used, in my old company, a VM solution.

It’s effortless to set up the solution. It’s not difficult at all. I’d rate it a four out of five in terms of the ease of setup.

The deployment is swift and doesn’t take too much time. We didn’t really have a specific strategy going into the implementation.

We only need one person to handle deployment and maintenance tasks.

I handled the initial setup in-house.

I wouldn’t be able to calculate an ROI. I’d rate the product a three out of five in terms of the likelihood of getting an ROI.

The pricing is reasonable. It was the main selling factor for us. We pay a yearly licensing fee. I have a gold edition, and it includes all the features that I need - so it's enough for me.

I’d rate it a three out of five in terms of the affordability of the usage.

We looked at other solutions. They’re all basically the same, however, this product offers a lower price. I was not a part of the evaluation process the last time around.

I’m a customer and end-user.

It is a useful solution and it can be used in any enterprise environment.

I’d rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for Veritas Backup Exec is to take the emails from all the servers and for backing up the files. We require administrative control of that process. 

We use Veritas for incremental backups for all the servers. It is an automated process. Lately, we have taken advantage of the full backup facilities provided by the product.

Veritas Backup Exec has enabled us to save costs.

One nice feature with Backup Exec is mainly that disaster can happen to any server and the disk image can be destroyed very easily. It's also easy to fully email the backup image and restore the server.

A lot of backup solutions are coming out now and a lot of new disaster recovery software is coming. We should see an updated cycle in six months or one year. Veritas Backup Exec should be more user-friendly. The costs should also be much lower and it should be easier to go through the disaster recovery process.

This solution has been working perfectly for us for many years now. I did not encounter any major problems or issues with it during production.

We need some more added value to this software, i.e. better disaster recovery.

The stability of the solution is good. I cannot think of any issues that we've had with stability. 

I would give the scalability an 8/10. We have more than 50 to 60 servers. We were declined to accomplish what the servers needed for images at that scale. 

We can support 50 servers and after that, we use some higher angle or higher position user permissions for backups because of our infrastructure requirements. 

For deployment and maintenance, we only require 4-5 people.

The technical support is very good. They give us very good support. We don't have any problems with support. 

We were also using Symantec Enterprise Vault.

It's easy to set up, setting up it is no problem. The configuration is also very easy. 

The setup time for Backup Exec was about one week. If the structure is very heavy, then it will take around one month to set up. 

We had some help from what our integration company would provide for the setup. Then we go through our own internal configuration settings. 

For Backup Exec usage, the client uses the software with us because we have a license for this product. The license availability we have is for ten years.

Licensing is somewhat expensive. They should decrease the price.

This solution we are using now is only for the data backups. The last data recovery we were on had different features and functionality.

Disaster recovery is only part of our backup solution for our internal operations. Other backup solutions were not as reliable, i.e. the previous solution crashed. After that, I knew that Backup Exec solution was what I was looking for because it has better features for recovery.

For our internal purposes, Veritas Backup Exec is very good, but for disaster recovery, you should go with another product. 

Nowadays, everything is going on the cloud and the backup solutions should also be also fast. A lot of things we are maintaining now require professional disaster recovery services. With Veritas, an internal alert problem is happening for all the windows which should be somewhat decreased. Then it would be better and more user-friendly.

I am giving Veritas Backup Exec an 8 out of 10. The Backup Exec software is very good but should be updated with new features. 

We deploy Veritas Backup Exec for customers where they have a production site with between 10 terabytes and up to 50 terabytes of data where they then backup the data to their local storage and then replicate it to their site or to the cloud.

I work with partners and end customers, Backup exec is improving yearly and they are introducing new features which enhance things like quick recovery with forever backup, global dedupe, etc.

The one thing for the last 12 months which has been very good for Veritas was the instance-based license. This means that you're able to license per instance, not only per physical server. And also, the incremental backup which they introduced for virtual servers, where it makes it much quicker to restore, it just automatically is able to mount it back to the original backup. This makes it much quicker when you're doing the restore.

The one thing which could be improved, which we have informed Veritas about, is the ability to plug in to the cloud. Meaning, instead of using local storage if we're backing up a small user or end user, we want to be able to make it so they can direct the backups directly to the cloud. It can't be done at the moment. We can only back up to the storage then replicate to the cloud, but we cannot use the cloud as a source of storage.

In terms of features, myself and my team are quite happy with most of the features. The only feature which we need is the plugin to the cloud. That's it. They've been doing a lot of improvements. The other part which they need to look at is the replication feature. In this case, we're talking about replicating between server to server. We do have a lot of competition from Veeam because of that. A lot of people want to have one server in the production side and one server at the other side, and replicate the servers across.

In my current position, I have been using Veritas Backup Exec three years, but I used the product previously when it was still under Symantec for four years.

100%. It's got great stability. In South Africa, it is widely used and it's got very good stability. Just that, as I said, only one improvement they need. Otherwise, the product itself is great.

It is scalable.

For one site you only need one person, max two. The administration or console is very easy to accommodate. One person is able to do that. That's no problem.

I work with technical support a lot whenever there are technical issues. They have been very good. Although they sometimes do battle with something, they eventually get it right. So I will rate them nine out of 10.

The initial setup is very easy.

Normally we take about two hours. It's just that sometime if the environment is old then you have to fix the environment first. But if everything work 100%, two hours, max four hours and then you're done.

For customers, the main point is to make sure that the skill of the solution is readily available in the county. That's the reason why it is an easy product to adopt or to onboard in your environment, especially here in South Africa.

On a scale of one to ten, I'll give Veritas Backup Exec a nine out of 10. It's just one point I'm taking off because of those two small issues. We feel that the competition is using it against Veritas.

I use the solution daily for daily backups and weekly for full backups and monthly for the stuff that gets sent off-site.

As far as if we need to restore a file, the solution absolutely has improved the way our organization functions. It saves us a lot of time. We're backing up all of our servers with it.

The backup potential of the solution is very good. It's protected us in the past very well and allowed us to get up and running after an attack with minimal loss.

The product needs to be consistent. Within the process itself, a lot of times it will hang on the jobs and you have to then restart all the services to get it to release. The job rate sometimes just randomly will tank. Therefore, you have to stop jobs and restart them in order to get them back at a quicker pace. Those are probably the two worst features. 

Something within the software itself isn't quite right. There may be a bug or glitch. It will work fine for weeks and then all of a sudden it just tanks.

I've been using the solution for about 12 years, however, it's my understanding that the company itself has likely used it longer.

We've found some sort of bug or glitch in the solution that makes it a bit unpredictable. It will work fine for weeks and then all of a sudden it just stops and takes a dive.

That said, it's pretty stable. I would probably say, it is at least 90% stable. It's that 10% where the job rates have a little bit of a problem. I was hoping that this newest version would be better, however, it has the same issues as older versions.

The solution's scalability is actually getting better. I have not tried to go into the virtual world with it, however, it says that the product can do it. I've not tried it due to the fact that we're using the other products for it, and have Veeam for a virtual solution.

There are three of us that would potentially could go into the product to use it. That includes a network administrator and myself.

At this point, we don't have plans to increase usage.

I have never used technical support personally just yet. The previous administrator had to for a couple of different issues and they mentioned that support was good. 

I'm not sure if a different solution was ever used. I've been at this company for 12 years and we have only used it. They used it even before I arrived. I'm not sure if anything came before it.

The initial implementation was actually fairly easy. It was pretty straightforward. I actually just rebuilt it and put it onto a newer server. It is actually very easy.

I had deployed within a day due to the fact that I was familiar with it. If somebody wasn't familiar with it, might take them up to a couple of days to do it. I was very familiar with it and therefore could do it pretty fast. It took me just a few hours or probably a day's worth of work to get everything in there, the way I wanted it.

We do not require any additional staff for deployment and maintenance.

We handled the implementation in-house. We didn't require a consultant or reseller to assist us.

Any time any of these products can back up your systems so that you can quickly restore them or restore files is most definitely beneficial to your company.

The solution is not the cheapest option. It's pretty pricey.

Although I know that we pay for it yearly, in March, I'm not sure of the exact costs.

The pricing goes by different types of databases that you're backing up. It's more expensive, for example, if you have an SQL database depending on what you're backing up.

I don't recall paying anything beyond a standard licensing fee for the product.

We're currently considering looking for a new solution. We want to see what is out there. This product is also quite expensive.

Having a reliable backup is essential to your company. For example, we were using this product to back up one of our servers that got the CryptoLocker virus. We were able to go back and restore it to just a few hours previous to the attack and we were able to get everybody right back up and running within a day, in less than a day's time. It absolutely could have just spread right through the whole environment had we not caught it. This solution gave us the ability to be able to get back up with minimal data loss.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. If they were able to take out some of the bugs we have found I'd rate it higher.

The solution is integrated with the Exchange, so it's an online backup.

There is no need to choose which file, which directory, or which components are required to select for the backup. Once the solution is integrated with the Exchange, you just click Exchange to back up that file.

The solution can be improved by adding the ability to restore individual mailboxes. Currently, the solution does not have the capability to restore a single mailbox, so you lose a lot of time having to restore for example ten mailboxes just to recover one. 

I have been using the solution for 12 years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is good. Our company is a support partner with Veritas.

Before using the solution we used Legato Backup and Symantec Backup which are both run with Linux operating systems. We switched because this solution is easier to use.

The initial setup of this solution is very easy. We require just half an hour for initial deployment, and for post-deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

I give the solution a six out of ten.

We currently have over one hundred people using the solution including L1, L2, and L3.

A single team is required for maintenance. A team of 10 people on multiple scales is managing that particular customer, not only specific to Exchange or specific to any backup or specific to any Windows operating system. We have a team of people with multi skills, looking at starting load balance, SQL, and data works like that.

The interface is intuitive and the documentation is good.

The solution is integrated with the Microsoft SQL database.

I use it in many uses, for example for Microsoft Exchange and for databases, for active directory and file servers. I use Backup Exec because it has agents for different software and is based on your infrastructure.

I remember in the 2010 version you needed to have two jobs per data source; one job for full backup and another job for a differential. But now you can merge both of them into a single record and have different schedules for them. The results and the interface are better now, and there is no extra knowledge needed for using this. It is very simple.

I prefer to use a tape library and Veritas Backup Exec is fully compatible with different tape libraries. So I prefer this software.

Of course, all of the solutions are agent-based, but granular recovery, GTR, works well in Backup Exec. It was Symantec in the past. I can easily recover a user or a file. It mainly works directly to the original location, which is why I prefer to use it.

In the past, it was not user-friendly. But nowadays it's very user friendly. But it could be better if it had a web-based interface. 

A web console would be great because nowadays a lot of products are web-based and you can access the console from various environments. So I would recommend bringing this feature in the next solution.

I want to have a user-friendly interface for virtualization. Now virtualization doesn't have an extra interface. A great interface would be good. And maybe it would be better if they launched a virtual appliance.

I have been using Veritas Backup Exec for at least six or seven years.

I am still working with it on daily projects.

It is stable. It's like other Windows based services. You turn down the tape library and want to restart services. I think it would be better to be more intelligent about these changes. For example, when I want to turn off the tape library and turn it back on, it would be better if there was no need to restart the services. Sometimes I need to restart services or even sometimes I need to restart the server in order to bring up the tape library or ABS.

I don't know how compatible it is with a cloud environment, but for scalability for SMB companies it's good because you could have one central management and deploy different servers in different areas and manage it in a single, central point. I think it is good for SMB's.

Generally, I use this solution for servers and not for clients.

It is good for small and medium clients. Although I think that it would not be popular with enterprise companies. I don't have experience in a closed environment. But I think if you don't have this environment, it would be good and suitable for them too.

Generally, Web Backup is more complex, but Backup Exec is easy to use. 

The initial setup is not very complex. I've deployed in different projects, but installation was the easiest part for me. Having a good plan for the backup solution is more complex than installation, I think. You have to consider the concurrent back-up jobs and the speed and data growth. 

It is good that you don't need to install an extra database.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Veritas Backup Exec an eight.

I would advise that it's not important which product you use because I think most of the products are good quality and nowadays have at least a standard because of technological enhancements, but it's more important to understand the concept of back-up and recovery. For example, how many jobs are needed, what is your infrastructure, what storage do you need, things like that. Having knowledge of data and back-up recovery is more important than the actual solution.

It's not important which tools you use, because nowadays all the solutions, for example, Veeam, are good. It's better to know what you want and to have good knowledge of back-up and recovery concepts, for example, storage, data, data growth, SQL, etc.