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Howdy all,

I have been looking into a replacement backup solution for my company for a couple of weeks now. The company is going through the growing pains from a small to a medium sized business and all that comes with that on the IT side. We currently have an outdated, incompatible version of Symantec Backup Exec that my boss has run for several years and always had issues no matter what he did and or worked out with Symantec support. As of today, just under half of our client backups randomly will work or not to begin with. When they do “work”, though, we are finding with testing that 89% of the backups that complete are corrupted and, thus, fail.

So, understandably, this is a pressing issue we need to get resolved. Since my boss has had no ends of issues with Backup Exec, he does not want to use that platform and would rather go with someone else. So far, I have gone through a bit of testing with Acronis and NovaStor. NovaStor seems to work pretty well. I just wanted to reach out and see if anyone had any experience with them and could relay their thoughts. Also, we are still open to other option if anyone knows of a good solution to recommend. Here is our setup we are looking to cover:

  1. We are wanting to cover with Full and/or incremental file based backups on the end user client level for 80 users. 75% of these users are in one of 3 local offices that have our domain and network infrastructure setup. The remaining 25% are remote end users across the USA working out of their homes on local ISP not tied to our network natively unless they connect through VPN. Some of these home ISP are pretty basic level DSL/Cell Phone 3G service level for internet bandwidth.

  2. We want a centralized management platform either web based or software based that we can setup and control all backups from to remotely administer the whole system.

  3. We have 8 servers we want to do full and/or incremental file based backups on that range from Exchange to SQL to VMWare.

  4. We have no issue creating a server to act as a launch point for storage if needed.

  5. We want to have all the backups stored on a remote server setup at RackSpace.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

3 Spice ups
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I couldn’t recommend unitrends any harder, they have a great product. I’ve been using the UEB for almost half a year now, and I love it, plus there’s plenty of others on here who would gladly recommend them.

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Unitrends and i’m pretty confident that you will find that’s the general census around here… it’s an amazing product that just works and when it doesn’t the support if hands down the best from any product i’ve used…they were/are offering a BOGO on the UEB (and maybe the appliances) though they do offer spiceheads a discount as well…

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Unitrends will not back up remote locations unless you deploy an appliance. I have tried backing up over a VPN and it was a miserable failure. I have the bandwidth it just doesn’t work.

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Thank you Laura & Magnus for recommending Unitrends!

Eryk - You may find this comparison between Untirends and Backup Exec helpful. Please let me know what questions I can answer for you regarding our free version, our appliances, or really, anything at all.

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Another point to be made about the appliance is its one throat to choke should anything go wrong… I love my 712 but just would have loved a 713 or 812 since it’d have more space on it… so if looking at an appliance (of any brand) make sure you are sized properly

edit: the added space would allow me to have a longer retention on a few of my servers rather than the 7-14 days I have now across 8 servers (4 VMs, a host, and 3 physical)

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Hello Eryk,

Here’s a similar thread discussing backup/recovery solutions.

I work for StorageCraft and am really amazed at our business continuity solution which includes ShadowProtect (the backup/recovery software), ImageManager (the verification, replication, retention policy, and reporting software), CMD (the single pane of glass admin console), and our new ShadowCloud (offsite cloud and VM service). I really believe this product suite will meet and exceed your needs. ShadowProtect and ShadowCloud are licensed while ImageManager and CMD are free software applications. You’re welcome to download a free, 30-day trial of ShadowProtect and try it out for yourself so you can be confident it’s what you want before you buy it.

Just to speak briefly to each of the points you mentioned:

  1. We are wanting to cover with Full and/or incremental file based backups on the end user client level for 80 users.

ShadowProtect provides full and/or continuous incremental backups for both physical and virtual systems. These are image-based backups which usually has the advantage of smaller backup sizes. Shadow-protect’s backup images can also be quickly virtualized as a failover VM in the event of a production system failure or as a virtual test system.

  1. We want a centralized management platform either web based or software based that we can setup and control all backups from to remotely administer the whole system.

CMD is a web based central management platform. It is a free product that allows for remote administration and reporting for the whole system. You can get more details about CMD here .

  1. We have 8 servers we want to do full and/or incremental file based backups on that range from Exchange to SQL to VMWare.

StorageCraft is a VMware partner. Our backup software also supports Citrix ZenServer, Oracle’s VirtualBox, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and RedHat’s KVM hypervisors. We support SQL servers and Exchange servers on both physical or virtual environments. We also have a Granular Recovery for Exchange (GRE) tool that provides additional tools for Exchange recovery and migration.

  1. We have no issue creating a server to act as a launch point for storage if needed.

You can create a server to act as a launch point for storage. You can also use standards SAN/NAS devices, network volumes, FTP hosts, and a host of other storage service devices. We are hardware agnostic, though we have built patented ShadowStream and bandwidth throttling technologies which are included in the ShadowProtect backup software.

  1. We want to have all the backups stored on a remote server setup at RackSpace.

You are certainly welcome to use your own cloud services. If you would like we offer competitive pricing with StorageCraft’s cloud services . In addition most cloud services out there only provide data archiving, while our ShadowCloud has the ability to virtualize your backup recovery point in our cloud in seconds if necessary. Also, we use military-grade AES 256 bit encryption to ensure that your data is secure.

I hope you’ll download the software and check us out for yourself. We’re an award-winning product built for SMB, MSP and VAR customers. Feel free to PM me if you have more questions or would like a demo.

Cheers!

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Hi Eryk,

Since your environment has multiple offices, an appliance-based solution could get very expensive if you put appliances in each office that has your domain and network infrastructure.

Instead, consider affordable enterprise-grade online server backup and recovery from Zetta.net .

Includes:

  • Support for Exchange, SQL, and VMWare (no additional per server or per application fees)

  • Web-based centralized management console

  • Fast, high-performance data transfer that shortens backup windows

All the best!

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Unitrends will not back up remote locations unless you deploy an appliance.
I have tried backing up over a VPN and it was a miserable failure. I have the bandwidth it just doesn’t work.

Really?? Why??

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I am not sure about your Exchange backup requirement, but for unstructured data Vaultize will be a good option. They also seem to be hosted on Rackspace.

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Rockn - Can you PM me the details of what happened so that we can help you resolve this.You should be able to backup your data using either UEB or a physical appliance with Unitrends.

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Check out http://www.barracudaware.com/

Cheap, not the fanciest but I have been running it for a couple months on exchange, sql, domain controllers, files servers, etc and haven’t had any issues.

TM

Note: I have done restores in exchange for testing and they worked slick.

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Something too that should be noted that just because something backs up easy it might not restore easy make sure that you take that into account as well for your DR plan

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Agreed SpenceLK. We are testing that aspect right now.

I guess more of a question is has anyone had experience with NovaStor and can relate their experience? So far, their price has been very reasonable, the customer service and tech support has been very good, and everything has been working well in testing. I just wanted to see if anyone had first hand experience with NovaStor in a corporate environment and could relate their thoughts on a more long term setup than just a test bed.

That being said, thanks for all the replies with all the good information so far!