Backup software

B

boss6021

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 11, 2006
Messages
386
Hey guys,

I'm looking for a backup solution that is reasonably priced, and works well. The current scenario is the following:

1 x Hyper-V host

2 x VMs (SBS and terminal server)

Removable drives for backup. Granular Exchange recovery is also preferred.

I looked into StorageCraft and Veeam. StorageCraft doesn't do removable drives well.

Thanks.
 
Define 'reasonably priced'? Once you get into virtualization, of any sort, backup software ain't cheap. Your choices are, pay or go free with Veeam free version, but as we all know, you can't schedule the free version and it has other limitations.
 
Use Windows Server backup.
Veeam doesn't do multiple drives either well not until 7 comes out.
 
Reasonable I would define as less than $1600 for the whole package. I figured as much with Veeam. I'm leaning towards Symantec or Acronis at this point.
 
Might not apply to this scenario, but nakivo also has a free edition, and a paid edition quite a bit less than veeam. Might not have the full feature set yet of veeam, but has added a lot of stuff in the year or so since it was released.
 
i cringe with the though of Symantec

Veeam is super easy to use, been using it myself lately.

Acronis tends to get expensive real fast!!
 
Veeam is amazing, but can be expensive out of the gate.

For just two servers, Acronis may be the way to go.
 
The biggest issue is when revolving backup disks are present. Most solutions prefer static backup locations.

i cringe with the though of Symantec

Veeam is super easy to use, been using it myself lately.

Acronis tends to get expensive real fast!!
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If I didn't already have extensive experience with Symantec, I would be in the same boat. But after having used it for the past 4+ years, I only have a small number of gripes, and none of which are with the actual backup and restore functionality.

For those that have worked with Veeam, how does it handle removable drives? Please assume that there is a possibility that a drive might not get swapped. In the case of Storagecraft, this borked the backups.

Thanks.
 
Veeam doesn't do multiple disks like symantec. Its supposed to be introduced in v 7.
 
yup, along with tape backups as well. Veeam is still young, and only targeting the Virtual market unfortunately, they could really corner the market if they went physical as well, but then i guess they would be just like all the others out there already.
 
Unitrends has some physical appliances that do archiving to removable hard drives. Ok it's more like a dock that you put a hard drive in, but you can archive backups to it.

What's your budget? I think their cheapest appliance starts at $2500
 
Check out Altaro Hyper-V Backup. Inbuilt support for external drives (RDX, etc), as well as decent encryption/compression. For the onsie,twosie installs, it fits the bill. The new version also supports granular export of Email to PST.

The only issue that I have with the new version V.4, is that it requires a local backup before it exports that to removable disk, effectively doubling the storage requirement. In most cases that can be solved by a USB3.0 external disk.
 
I've been using Veeam now for two years. I'm happy with it. I have always saved the backup file to local disk then when the backup finishes, it runs robocopy to copy the files to an external disk.
 
k1pp3r said:
I have it running right now, can also process more than one VHD at a time which has decreased my backup time by a good bit
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How much more power does it consume when it does? I haven't enabled parallel processing just yet. I'm going to enable it this weekend.
 
QHalo said:
How much more power does it consume when it does? I haven't enabled parallel processing just yet. I'm going to enable it this weekend.
Click to expand...

Hard to tell, my CPU spiked before the update, recently CPU usage has hovered around 40% which is odd, on 6.5 it stayed at 100% through the entire job list.

It seems to have cut my total backup time roughly in half. I could decrease it more if I threw more cores at veeam, but don't see the need right now.

I run Veeam to a server share then robo copy to an external device.
 
So, now with version 7 it's possible to backup directly to removable hard drives? I would prefer to skip the extra Robocopy step if possible. Also, are the backup sizes close to original file sizes? I only ask because with Storagecraft the backups are monstrous compared to what is being backed up. This particular client only has 500GB external drives and about 370GB worth of data on a full backup.
 
I have backed up with veeam to a server that has a USB3 drive hooked up, the destination was the bottleneck but it works.
 
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