Arctera Backup Exec is a backup and disaster recovery solution. It works in virtual, physical, and multi-cloud environments and integrates with several third-party software releases and applications.
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Barracuda Backup
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Designed to be simple to configure and manage, the scalable Barracuda Backup solution is offered via a capacity-based, all-inclusive subscription model allows you to pay for only what you need to protect today, avoiding large upfront hardware costs.
Backup Exec (when it was still under the Symantec umbrella) used to offer a backup appliance for local-cloud backup. It was expensive. I don't think they offer it anymore. In any case we wanted to engage such a solution and have been using Barracuda Backup for several years. It …
Symantec and Acronis are well matched, but Symantec is more flexible in designing jobs. Acronis creates images that are mountable whereas Symantec creates backup files that can be restored quickly and easily. Barracuda and Datto are "total data storage" backup options and …
All solutions have their positive, neutral, and negative points. Veritas Backup Exec is excellent too. But it is more expensive and does not offer a management interface as friendly as Barracuda Backup is. We also have brand reliability because other company employees have also …
All mentioned venders above did not give me the one-stop-shop approach to backup that I was looking for. Also, global deduplication and compression was a huge saving on local space. Most venders also charge per VM or per application being backed up, and this is cost-prohibitive …
The time necessary to manage Barracuda Backups is leaps and bounds superior to Backup Exec. Backup Exec has tons of great features but required constant maintenance. In the end we just wanted the ability to easily schedule, set retention periods and the ability to backup and …
Each backup solution has its pros and cons, and each customer has their needs, and budget constraints. Barracuda Backup has helped us dramatically in the area of being able to provide customers a cost-effective solution, that's easy to manage and is one of those things you're …
We have used Datto as well as Symantec Backup Exec. Datto is 2X the cost of Barracuda for apples to apples specs. Also, we have not had good experiences with the Datto (pushy) sales people. Backup Exec is a local on-premise product, when if you get a crypto infection it can …
While many solutions, such as Acronis and Symantec Backup Exec rely on number of agents or database services, Barracuda and Datto rely on total data storage. Barracuda's key feature is the hardware refresh. After 4 years of maintaining subscriptions, customers are entitled to …
Not wanting to place all our data in on basket, we also utilize a B2T library, having both systems in place allows me more agility should one of the two systems go offline.
I found Backup Exec to be clunky and difficult to navigate. I definitely didn't want to have to go change out tapes every day for all of my servers. Other solutions had tape carousels etc but you still had to swap them out. I like that BBS is cloud based and easy to connect to …
One of the differentials is that of all the backup tools I used, Veritas Backup Exec has the best management and control interface. It is very easy to use and configure the rules. There are several options that we can optimize our work for our specific needs, from scheduling a backup, restoring data, directories, alerts system, error reports, backups, inconsistencies and other very interesting things. It has integration with SQL, vmware, hyper v. Backup and restore speeds are fast and secure.
If you are a small business with a few machines and your backups aren't of servers that are public facing. If you had to restore a server from backup, it would take a day at least. So, if the server being restored was public facing, that may impact customer relations.
The cloud control is great!! I'm able to restore files and folders from basically any machine on the Internet. I can restore either the local machine I'm using at the time, or directly to the server from which it came.
The user interface. Very easy to use and understand. Loads of options and configurations you can optimize for your particular needs.
Instance replacement. We have had an issue with one unit due to some hardware failure. Barracuda was amazing on getting this replaced quickly and getting us back on track.
The user interface can sometimes be sluggish and hang between options.The minimum spec is 2Gb but if running on a dedicated server I think 4Gb is recommended
As more companies seem to be entering the backup software market, Acronis is very aggressive on pricing and even offer discounts if you are replacing other backup solutions, the Backup Exec pricing plans have become a more expensive
Our version is an older 2014 version and has inadequate support for VM backs
You can't define backup systems to just go to the cloud, it has to be stored locally as well, which eats up the local storage.
These appliances are high-priced for a small amount of storage and if you want to upgrade, you buy a new appliance. There's no replacing hard drives, you basically move up $5K for each 2Tb and replace the entire appliance each time. It's not a healthy model for growth.
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.
Dashboards and interfaces within Barracuda Backup are very easy to navigate, with clear success/warnings shown. Setting up backup jobs is probably one of the most simplest tasks - compared to competitors we trialed. Trouble shooting backup issues is also simple due to clear errors (VSS errors shown in a understandable format for example)
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.
They are always quick to get you routed to a tech support person and always get follow up after contacting them. Last experience was amazing, she adjusted my boxes and they perform even better. I cannot say enough about the support. We had some trouble with one of the windows servers leaving the volume shadow copy out there and would fail. They worked with us to adjust and get working. After that it has been months since I have had to do anything with the server to keep the backups running.
Veritas Backup Exec is very comparable to Unitrends and in some areas is easier to use. The license side of Veritas Backup Exec is much more difficult to manage compared to Unitrends. Unitrends seems to be a much smoother solutions to protect virtual environments. Restoring data with Veritas Backup Exec is logical and easier to achieve, Unitrends is a bit less logical or intuitive.
The time necessary to manage Barracuda Backups is leaps and bounds superior to Backup Exec. Backup Exec has tons of great features but required constant maintenance. In the end we just wanted the ability to easily schedule, set retention periods and the ability to backup and restore. Barracuda does this exceptionally well.
As the person tasked with the job of protecting the company's data, I am glad that Backup Exec performs that job well. I am able to often set-it-and-forget-it and go about the rest of my duties. I have never had a situation where Backup Exec was called upon to restore data and it was unable to do so. This reflects well on both me and my department and provides a sense of security to the rest of the company.
I am not making full use of the product and have not licensed a number of its features, but even the base feature set is impressive. To be clear, Backup Exec is no longer the only product we reply upon for data protection, but it is still a large part of that program. If an SMB can find the budget to afford to license the set of features meet its particular demands, Backup Exec will do what you need.
As an industry leader, Backup Exec is well positioned to stay at the head of the pack (as they have done for many years) and provide their customers with a comprehensive set of capabilities that will always remain in the forefront of technology.