Hi, John. How many computers do you have needing backup? And do you need something to back up every day or once a week? And can the backup be in the cloud, or do you need the backup on site?

I use Mozy - it backs up to the cloud. Really great customer service, in my experience. 

Hi John,

Our org uses a few different flavors of Backup Exec.  I just read the product description of BE 2012, and you'll be pleasantly surprised to read this:

The version of Backup Exec available through TechSoup includes all of the available agents and options. For a complete list, see Backup Exec agents and options.

I hope this answers your question fully for you.

Best of luck,

Gary

Greetings all.

I am part of the Backup Exec product management team.  I want to make sure that you get the right version of BE, as there are couple of different licensing options.  If you are running a virtualized environment, the V-Ray Edition is licensed per occupied socket and is all-you-can-eat.  We also have a capacity licensing scheme in addition to the standard licensing.

Happy to answer any questions to make sure you get exactly what you need.

Matt Stephenson

@PackMatt73

Hi Matt,

Thank you for chiming in on the discussion.  It is great to have someone from a product team to be able to contribute.  Hopefully in the future the V-Ray edition could be offered on TechSoup.  

Hi John,

We provide IT solutions to Non-Profits in San Diego.  The eaisest way to back up an onsite server with server 2008/2012 is to back up to an external hard drive.  Backup Exec has a lot of issues with this, in that when the drive fills up it doesn't overwrite older files without intervention correctly.  We also find that it often hangs on backups, especially if the media is full. The end result with Backup Exec is frequent calls to IT to resolve backup issues or backups that aren't working when you need them because they haven't been montiored.

We recommend Windows Server backup or Wbadmin, which is built-in to Windows and will do full server images to an external hard drive along with folder level backups.  It notices when the the drive is nearing capacity and then deletes older versions.  If you have 500GB server, with a 2 terabyte external hard drive, you will get around 3 weeks of file level backup and one ngithly synced image.  You can also create additional server images at points in time, or run additional server images on a schedule.

It also allows you to restore to a VM, which is practical when you want to extract a mailbox.

For larger networks we recommend Microsoft Data Protection Manager, which works well with Exchange and SQL recoveries.  DPM has to run on a separate server or VM.  DPM is included in the Core Cal Suite so it's inexpensive to purchase.