Arcserve Backup is a storage management solution from Arcserve, formerly of CA Technologies before Arcserve's divestiture (July 2014). It utilizes magnetic tape storage backup as part of its storage management offering.
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Arctera Backup Exec
Score 6.8 out of 10
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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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Pricing
Arcserve Backup
Arctera Backup Exec
Editions & Modules
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Veritas Backup Exec
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Arcserve Backup
Arctera Backup Exec
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Arcserve Backup
Arctera Backup Exec
Features
Arcserve Backup
Arctera Backup Exec
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Arcserve Backup has had a positive impact on ROI, as a reseller we are able to build in a healthy profit margin by reselling the product and services. Some of our company managed services are based upon clients running Arcserve Backup. Data recovery and system recovery times have reduced over product upgrades and enhancements, causing much less downtime
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.
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
Arcserve UDP provides our organization lots of benefits and it is much more than a simple backup and restore solution. We use it for cross platform DR, storage agnostic replications, DR solution instead of VMware SRM and more.
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 basically covers all our required scenarios, including VMs, partitions, files or any other objects through NAS, SAN or DAS connections. It's easy to set up and utilize the features and functions. There are a few times that we needed to switch over for the RHA replications and UDP backups. For the RHN replication, there was a roughly 10 minutes downtime during the switchover. For the UDP, it works pretty well.
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.
Arcserve Backup support is usually very good. Their chat is usually able to fix most general issues, but will escalate more in depth issues to technical engineers that call you back. Their product knowledge is really good and usually resolve issues promptly.
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.
We also use Veeam replication and backups for VMWare level data redundancy. It works so far as stable as Arcserve Backup. We use both in our systems as we deploy VMs since Veeam works closely with VCenter. But if we need to backup physical servers, and OS partition level backups, which can only be achieved by Arcserve Backup.
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.
Arcserve Backup is relatively low cost in comparison to some other products. It is full-featured and continues to receive additional updates and added features. This makes it an ideal backup solution for smaller sites and the reliability to restore from backups is excellent.
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.
