Plain old NTBackup vs Symantec Backup Exec 12.5...

Hi,

I'm looking at whether it's worth getting Symantec Backup Exec from Techsoup for our little org. At the moment we have just the one server running 2003 and the previous admin seemed to have been happy with using NTBackup. We don't have an Exchange server - all email is pop3 from an external server. We're currently backing up to an external HD which is taken offsite periodically.

I'm currently researching the pros and cons of each of the backup products and I'm finding it difficult to justify getting Backup Exec, even at the cheap TechSoup price. We only have one server, so we won't need to do remote backups (a failing with NTBackup apparently), and all machines are switched off at night when backups take place so backing up open files isn't an issue (a stated advantage with Backup Exec).

Can anyone offer any advice? Is there anything else I'm maybe not taking into account when deciding what to go for?

Many thanks

Here is another thread that is similar about backup strategies http://forums.techsoup.org/cs/forums/t/28832.aspx although for a larger implementation.

some of the questions I raised are relevant

You come in the morning and your server and the external HD is gone,  how do you recover?

You come in the morning and the hard disk in the server is broken, how do you recover?

A user wants a file that was available a month or two ago but can't be found on the server today, how do you get the file back?

Most of these can be recovered with NT backup or Backup Exec but planning testing and verification are important if the files and server are important to your org.

Dave

Yes, being able to answer Dave's questions are more important than the method you use.  So long as the method (or software) you use to backup can satisfy these requirements, you're covered.  I find BE 12.5 (or central systems like them) to be good when you are managing multiple backup sets from multiple machines.  But as you said, it's just the one server so...

The other question I would add to Dave's is are users aware of where they need to save files in order for them to be backed up?

Also, you said POP3 - do you backup email folders?  Where is the email residing?  If you're using Outlook to manage the POP3 email, then you may want to consider one of two things:

• The Outlook Personal Folders Backup add on from Microsoft - this will put the power in the users' hands.  If they ignore it or turn it off, it's "their fault."  But you can default it to save in their user folder on your server.  Warning - this might significantly increase your backup set ;)
• Making sure you find a way to backup the .PST file with a scheduled backup...  try to make sure Outlook isn't running if you backup this way.
  • if you had BE 12.5, you would only need to make sure the desktops were on in order to back them up - because you could install the remote agent.  You could also backup profile information if this is not already synchronized with your server (like web bookmarks, outlook .NK2 files, other application data files).

You guys are certainly correct in that the backup policy is more important than the actual software. It's something I'm working on at the moment (amongst a ton of other things) - how often to do full backups (weekly at the moment), whether to do nightly incremential or differential backups, and so on.  I'll trawl through some of the previous threads and see how others have their backups set up.

We're going to buy some Symantec Corp AV licenses soon and the donation rules state - I think - that we can only order from Symantec once per fiscal year. So I kind of need to decide now whether we're likely to need to use Backup Exec in the oncoming 12 months.

As for the email set up: currently each user is supposed to copy their own .pst file(s) on their machine to a specific folder on a network drive, and this folder gets included in the backups. Not ideal, but that's also something I need to look at sometime. And yeah, this really should be an automated process. So the B.E. remote agent is able to copy specified files across to the server in order to get included in the backups? That's great, and as you say would also be a good way of backing up other local data.

Thanks a lot for the input guys. This is a great forum :)

The Microsoft personal folders tool is really pretty nice and worth considering even if you go the agent route, because if the pst file gets corrupted beyond repair the agent will backup the corrupted file, this at least gives you one more chance of recovery.  The only thing missing from the tool is auto renaming of the backup file, so it writes over the previous file with each backup.

Dave

Yeah, the agent would remotely back it up, but also you don't need to do that either if you have users putting it on a network folder - and the backup plugin to Outlook will remind them to do so and give them a button to click.  As Dave mentioned, the only thing wrong is that it will overwrite the last backup.  But if you're doing incrementals nightly, that should be okay - it just increases your time to restore.

What AV are you using now?  You may want to go for Symantec AV and just deal with regular windows backup.  Schedule Windows NT backup on the server (and any other machines you want to backup - you could have them schedule to backup to the server as well).  I used this command line SMTP mailer program to take the logs and email them to me - this might not work for you as you are POPing email from an external server...

I do what I can to help identify the systems in the email, then I use Outlook rules to let me know if something is wrong.

Our organization is regulated, and one of the regulations states that not only do we need to have a backup process, but we need to test that process periodically. We need to perform an actual restore from a backup and document and log the fact that we did so.

My point is that having a plan in place is one thing. Proving it's usefulness is quite another. When you are shopping for a backup solution, it is great to evaluate the ease and completness of the backup, but it is equally important to evaluate the restore capabilities. It may very well change the way you look at any particular solution. Backing up the data is worthless if the restoration process is problematic.