Veritas Backup Exec Reviews

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.

Primarily we use the solution for our ERP, databases, and applications. 

The most important part of any organization is the data. When you do a backup, you want the data to be available whenever it is required. Veritas offers a more predictable backup and recovery process.

The beauty of the solution is that you can rely on it. It offers a quick recovery time when it's backing up items. The way it recovers data is excellent. Sometimes with other software, a complete backup doesn't happen. 

With Veritas, the SLAs are pretty predictable and you can achieve complete backups easily. It offers duplication and compression and the safe sorting of information.

The licensing packet is confusing. If Veritas could do a better job of clarifying it, that would be helpful. For example, if you have a mixed environment of Linux and Windows, you end up buying too many licenses. If you compare it to Veeam, for example, it allows you to buy one simple license that you can use on all of your operating systems. They've made it very simple. 

The industry trend is moving towards hyper-converged and a regular pay-as-you-go model with more simplified resources. Users are looking for a plug-and-play kind of solution. Veritas should move towards this as well.

The stability of the solution is good.

Our organization doesn't grow much. For our customers, however, it has been very valuable. The licensing structure is a bit difficult. You have to keep buying the licenses even if you have the capacity. It's not simple. 

Technical support is pretty good. They are available 24/7.

The initial setup was pretty simple because we have expertise. We are partners with Veritas and we do installations on a regular basis. 

In reality, the installation time is even shorter for the Veritas portion. Integration, of course, takes a bit of time. You need approvals for the different application owners, for example. It takes time, but installation is a maximum of one day.

We are a reseller, so we handle the implementation of the solution for clients.

We have licenses that run on a yearly basis. We are paying somewhere around $10-15,000 on licensing a month. We don't have too big of an environment. 

We're a reseller of this solution. We also use an on-premises version in our offices.

It is the most preferred backup solution for data protection for our customers. 

We use it ourselves for our production environment backup. Whoever is accessing our server, whoever is accessing the sources, is using it. It's mandatory for our organization to understand the product. Everyone including the sales team, the pre-sales, the technical guys,  etc., everybody knows the product.

If you are looking for a safe and reliable solution, I would recommend it. If you're looking for something new, or something sleeker or more simplified which will give you more flexibility, I would recommend a Google product. 

In this solution, you have a lot of features. You can use it as secondary storage. You can use it for a backup that's more granular. Like Veeam, you can recover items from the database.

It would be good to add more features, like APIs.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

It is for backup and business continuity. You have a technology in there that allows you to start virtual machines on the backup set of data, which is really cool stuff. It also allows you to have an image of your environment. You can drop an image onto a virtual machine and just spin that environment up.

It supports cloud and on-prem deployments. If you have the infrastructure in the cloud, you can deploy it there. If you want an on-prem solution, that also works. The cloud provider is usually Amazon, but it doesn't really matter.

Synthetic backup is valuable. It gives you the possibility to do a synthesized backup, which means that it combines a full backup and incremental backup data and gives it to you in one stream. So, you don't have to restore the full backup and then later go and restore the incremental backup. You can do that in one go. 

It has also got some backup lifecycle policies that allow you to do different things in one backup definition. So, in one backup definition, you are backing up data, copying it to another place, and probably creating an image of the data. You are doing multiple things in one backup configuration, which is very good because it simplifies the way administrators work.

I wish that they have an outlet for the other products from Veritas built into the Backup Exec product. For example, Backup Exec does only server backup. Currently, it is possible to read the backup of one other product, but if they can add more products so that you can just go into the dashboard of these other products by clicking on a button within the Backup Exec product, it would be great.

They should also increase the number of applications that it is backing up currently.

I've been working with this product, in general, for about five years.

It is very stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of stability.

It is scalable and manageable. Some of the solutions can scale but become complex to manage. This is scalable and easily manageable.

They provide great support. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

It is very simple and straightforward. It is done in 30 minutes. One engineer is enough for its deployment.

The whole implementation in a small-sized or medium-sized environment takes a maximum of three days. In a large one, it depends on the number of machines and different use cases that you're looking at, but usually, in a week, you are done. In the first two to three days, you would have done quite a lot of the deployment. It is just more about having conversations with the backup admin to understand, for example, how often they want the data backed up and other little things, but in terms of getting the solution to work, it is pretty straightforward.

The ROI is really good, and it is better than most of the other competing products. I would rate it a four out of five in this aspect.

It is affordable, but I hope that the price will come down a lot because of other competitors. It is a good price for the customer, but sometimes, the competition provides a much lower price. 

There are two ways to license it. You can license it per instance or per terabytes of data that we are mocking up. It is enough because it is not so complex. It is good when you're working with customers.

OEM has always been a data company. They've always wanted to protect data. The methodology, the idea, or the concept behind the Backup Exec application is that you can back up and restore your data, and you can go to sleep. There are other newer solutions on the market. Of course, they also do the job, but when it comes to working in a simple manner, Backup Exec does the job well. So, one should not just say that Backup Exec is a product that has been around for a long time, and it is not modern. Backup Exec is very modern, very fresh. You should at least try it out before you make any decisions.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We have an on-premise deployment with a master server and five media servers. There is also Tape Libraries included and the maturity of the solution let us backup everything with assurance. 

Veritas is the main backup solution in our company. We have hundreds of virtual machines that we back up. They are VMware, Windows, and physical servers. It makes our backup process so stable and robust. Everybody with every kind of OS and service depend on our backup structure.

The most valuable feature is the SLP, and using it has been very beneficial.

The user interface needs improvement. When comparing the user interface to other backup and replication products, it is greatly lacks in UI. In some cases when I have an error, I need to use the command line. I prefer to have access to the logs of different services through UI and even to the services itself.

About the stability, It has occurred to me sometimes that I have crash on the master server. Sometimes in Device monitor you lose a device but after recovery the state doesn't change and you need to restart the application. But about the Backup processes, it is stable like 99.99. I suggest this solution to those who would like to run backup up solutions.

This is a very scalable solution. If you want to scale outside of our building then it can be done easily. It just requires installation of a new media server that is then joined to the master server. I have not seen another backup solution as scalable as this one.

I have been able to learn how to use this solution on my own, without training. Where I am, in Iran, we do not have an official Veritas branch. Therefore, most of the teachers are self-taught and have not used official technical support.

When I encounter an error, the first thing I do is visit the Veritas forum. Usually, I find a solution to the problem based on the type of error. In fact, the backup forum seems to be full and complete because there is no error that I have not been able to solve.

The installation of this solution was easy. Before the installation begins, you have to know the structure of your company and what scenario fits. For example, we are a company with master media, and we install it on our servers. We have about five full-size media centers and a master server. The installation is straightforward for an IT person.

I and one other person made up the team responsible for implementing this solution.

I have suggested this solution to four of five people. For big companies, with more than fifty people, I recommend this product completely. However, for companies with less than fifty people, I don't suggest it.

For the installation, you need at least two servers and a tape librarian. This is a good enterprise-level solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

We use this solution for data backup on premises, for data servers and file servers.

It has improved my organization. The data disk to disk to tape method is very helpful and it is easy to restore the individual or folder lever restoration is much easier.

The disk-to-disk-to-tape backup feature is quite good, and BKF file locking is a very important and safe silent feature.

Whenever a job fails, it would be a great improvement to be able to resume the job from the job got failed that feature. Suppose a job was started this morning and that it is going on while there are interruptions like network issues, server restart issues, server connectivity issues, services stopping, etc. For some reason, let's assume that the job failed or that it was mistakenly canceled by another person. It will be a great improvement if that failed job can be continued automatically or as a manual task. 

Exchange backup restoration takes a long time. Restoring a single email from the backup entire database is virtually occupies the entire system disk and it is huge pain. So, exchange email restoration should be simplified.

Some time no reason some backups are getting failed after certain percentage, if I run the job again manually one by one then it will run successfully from one particular server. 

Additional ransomware protection mechanisms could also be added.

I've been using this product for the last 22 years or more.

The product is stable, but sometimes, it is slow. Another challenge is that if there is a server with 10 drives, I may have volumes five and nine failing while the others are fine.

It is scalable.

Veritas' technical support is okay; not remarkable. The documentation is okay as well.

Neutral

We worked with Veeam Backup, which is good.

Because I've been using Veritas Backup Exec for 22 plus years, the initial setup is quite easy.

The installation and configuration, including tape drive, agent configuration, etc., took about one to one and a half hours.

I implemented the solution internally by myself. 

The pricing is reasonable. 

I previously evaluated ComVault and Druva.

Better architects should be there to create the backup systems. Dedicated backup servers, dedicated switches, and separate networks would be good. Resume option for failed JOB. 

I would give an overall rating of six on a scale from one to ten for Veritas Backup Exec.

Our primary use is that we are using it for backup mostly with Hyper-V service.  

It allowed us to step up to a better backup routine from the previous product we were using.  

The most valuable features for me are the ease of restoring the data and the backup window.  

I think that the one place the product could improve the most is in user-friendliness. If you compare it with Veritas' NetBackup, for example, that difference is pretty clear. They could take a lesson from their own products.  

Capability-wise the Backup Exec product is very good, but the lack of user-friendliness means people struggle to find and use some of the interesting features that would otherwise benefit from. They will miss utilizing those capabilities.  

Reporting capabilities are not up to the standard of other products. If you compare the reports which we get from NetBackup, those contain a lot of information that we need and do not get with Backup Exec. By comparison, the Backup Exec reports are pretty simple.  

Better reporting capability and a more user-friendly design would greatly improve usability.  

We have been using Veritas for backup for close to five years now.  

We have not seen any glitches in the product's function. It has always been stable and reliable.  

It is easy to scale the solution. There is a limitation to the size or complexity of the environment that it will be optimal for, but it is scalable.  

The technical support is pretty good. We have reached out for Backup Exec and we have gotten the support that we needed.  

We were using Data Protection Manager prior to Backup Exec. We switched to Veritas because we saw by comparison that it was a better product for our situation with more capabilities.  

The setup was simple. I do not really remember exactly how much time it took to set up because it has been quite some time now, but I know that we did not have issues getting it up and running.  

The setup was done by a small team from within our company without the help of a vendor or integrator. The team was mostly made up of engineers within the company. The product has remained in place for about five years.  

It requires maintenance from our side. Usually, it is mostly the admins managing it, so that is about four people in our case.  

The cost of Veritas is really mid-range for this class of product, I would say. Everything is included in one license and there are no additional, hidden costs.  

My advice to anyone considering this product would be to know how many servers have to be covered and the complexity of the environment as well as the capabilities of Backup Exec. Veritas cannot handle a complex environment very well. It is really only designed for a simple environment.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I can rate Veritas Backup Exec as somewhere around eight. It has some very good capabilities but limitations with system complexity, user-friendliness, and depth of reporting.  

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.