Comments on: Symantec Backup Exec vs Veeam

By: Ted Mittelstaedt

Ted Mittelstaedt — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 16:25:59 +0000

BE 2014 got enough service packs released so it finally stabilized but it still will glitch every once in a while. Once very few weeks an agent will stop reading files in the middle of a backup and to fix that the server being backed up has to be restarted. The rule of thumb with BE is to always run a version behind since they follow the model of release a version with a lot of bugs then release service packs that fix them.

The real reason it was so buggy was because Veritas decided to write most of it in .NET and .NET was very very very buggy for many many many years. That’s why Microsoft kept releasing new versions.

The big problem with veem is it won’t backup the free ESXi you must pay for the commercial version of ESXi. So the true cost of veem is sky high. And veem has refused to support the free Vmware probably because there is an under-the-table agreement with them and vmware.

The reality though in windows backup is that ALL windows backup products are based on the VSS api’s that are built into windows and those are almost undocumented, and that system has very few tools from Microsoft that can be used to troubleshoot it. If that system gets screwed up then your backup program will fail no matter who it comes from including Microsoft.

The main difference between the cheap backup solutions like BE is support. The super expensive enterprise systems that cost $100k a year have guys on staff with a lot of secret tools and such who can go in and completely clean out problems in your servers. Their software isn’t structurally any better but their support is top notch. BE’s support is all in India and it is all geared to being so slow that you give up and uninstall and reinstall their product by the time they get around to getting back to you and doing that fixes 90% of the problems when it goes off the rails.

By: BackupExecGuy

BackupExecGuy — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 05:48:13 +0000

Backup Exec Version 15 and 16 does have new OS Support and Virtualization platforms supports from the first day they released and can be proved on paper.

Moreover Veritas Backup Exec is a Unified solution for Physical and Virtual both and both workloads can be managed using a Single Glass of Pane. So the complexity automatically increases as Veeam has different products for Physical and Virtual (Major on Virtual only).

Their technology for Virtual is pretty straight forward only snapshots that’s it and that is the one of the biggest reason why Tape Backup is not supported easily.

Strong Points of BE:
• Unified Solution
• Single glass of Pane for all the operations irrespective of physical, virtual or cloud
• Global De-duplication across platforms either virtual or physical
• Instant Recovery for VM’s from Point of Time
• Licensing approach is also simpler
• Optimized de-duplication and that’s why we do not need WAN Acceleration as we replicate/duplicate only changed data

Etc etc depends on scenario to scenario and according to requirement……

Strong Points of Veeam:
Veeam has a feature called Sure backup / Sure replica which in combination with Virtual lab, starts all the servers and makes sure that they are able to run and that services work after the backup. it’s smart as it knows that for Exchange recovery you need working AD. First it starts AD server, once up and running it starts Exchange and it makes sure that both work and can be recovered so you can sleep.

This is the feature now which is really great but again only for Virtual and Too much CPU Intensive which even Veeam states clearly in there guides….

• SureReplica
• SureBackup
• Application Group
• Virtual Labs

By: ShadowMV

ShadowMV — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:56:24 +0000

Thanks Eric for the detailed analysis. I am currently doing my own backup analysis and sifting through dozens of reviews trying to pick the best candidate for our customers. This helped a lot!