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Author
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Topic: What enterprise backup software do you recommend?
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Mark J. Marshall
Film God
Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted 09-19-2006 12:29 PM
Well, we've been using Backup Exec here for a while. It's been running on a Netware server since I started here about six years ago. Recently we added a linux server that needed backing up, and low and behold, we're told by Symantec that in order to backup that one server, we have to upgrade our entire enterprise from BE 9.1 to BE 9.2. What a pain in the ASS! We can't just buy the 9.2 agent so the 9.1 server can back it up? Nope! So... here we are.
We have Netware 5.1 and 6.5 servers, which will all eventually be replaced with Linux servers. We have a couple of Windows 2000 servers, and some 2003 servers also. In addition to that, we have a couple of Red Hat Enterprise 3 & 4 servers, and now a SUSE server. All in all, probably about 25 or so servers need backing up. Since we have to change the entire enterprise anyway, I wanted to know... what do you use? And how does it work for you?
Thanks.
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 09-19-2006 12:39 PM
This is a sore point with me. Backup software is either free (e.g. Amanda) or it costs $30,000+ (e.g. Veritas, Legato, etc.). There's not much in between, unfortunately.
Backup Exec is worthless if you have Linux or Unix machines, as it cannot do an incremental backup of the Unix filesystem (it depends on the archive bit in NT, which doesn't exist in Unix). I have heard nothing but horrible things about Arcserve.
We're using Arkeia at work at the moment. The good points are that it's not outrageously expensive, and restoration from tape is super-fast. It is also quite flexible and configurable. The downside is that it can be slow (especially if you have large numbers of small files), due to its braindead database scheme, and it uses a proprietary format whhen writing the backups (which means that you need the software in order to restore anything). Their support is mediocre. For reference, we're backing up about 400 gigs' worth of data in upwards of 2.5 million files, using LTO-3 tapes.
I haven't yet worked for anyone who wanted to spend the $$$ on Veritas or Legato, but both seem like good systems, with different strong and weak points.
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David Stambaugh
Film God
Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 09-20-2006 07:16 PM
Been using ArcServe for Windows for many years and through many iterations. It's had its share of ups and downs. The current release 11.5 seems extremely stable and reliable, no problems to speak of, as long as you DO NOT use its built-in database engine. I forget who makes it but it's a TOTAL PIECE OF SHIT. Not only is it very S-L-O-W but it corrupts itself practically monthly, forcing you to start over with a clean database. I finally switched to a SQL database (happens to be MS SQL Server 2000) about six months ago and it's been running perfectly ever since. Also SQL is incredibly faster when trying to locate some obscure file to be restored.
For the best performance when backing up Windows servers with ArcServe, you need the Windows Client Agent on them. With the agent, backup performance is like 2-4 times faster. You might also need the Open File Agent, although the need for that is lessened on W3K servers if you use VSS and have VSS-aware apps running on the servers (like Exchange 2003).
I'm backing up several Windows servers plus Exchange (with Exchange Backup Agent for its bricks-level capability). Around 1TB of data, a mix of large and small files (including a Perforce version control system that creates hundreds of thousands of folders). I can get a full backup done in about 10 hours, give or take. Using a Sony AIT-4 8-slot library, which has also worked perfectly. AIT-4 media are 200GB native, 520GB if you get perfect compression.
ArcServe can supposedly back up other operating systems besides Windows but I've never tried it, can't vouch for how well it would work. It works fine with Windows though.
ArcServe isn't free, but it seems reasonably priced. I have no complaints with it other than its native database engine being a piece of crap.
I did use ArcServe with Novell servers up to 2001, and it mostly worked fine as far as I can recall, with the exception of the occasional corrupted database.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 09-22-2006 08:11 AM
My experience is very similar to David's. We've used Arcserve since version 5 or 6. All of them seem to have problems, but 11.5 seems to be by far the best so far; loads of problems with 9, 11 and rather less with 11.1. We did try Backup Exec on one machine some years ago, but that had other issues, overall probably no better and no worse than Arcserve, so we stayed with the devil we knew.
We now only have a couple of servers running Arcserve; one of which is a dedicated backup server which runs Arcserve, and connects to various clients and agents on other servers; it doesn't do anything else. We're backing up about a dozen servers this way. One server has it's own copy of arcserve and local tape drive, many small ones back up to two 2TB. LaCie Gigabit Ethernet disks, which are in turn backed up to tape, and a few are not backed up; the backup server itself for example, as they store no data, and if we loose them we simply restore a Ghost image onto them.
We are running the Arcserve on Windows machines and backing up both Windows and Linux boxes with it. The backup server is a Dell PowerEdge 1850, a little 1U rackmount thing, and it's connected via SCSI to a Powervault 132T tape library with 22 slots and two tape drives, originally LTO1, and upgraded to LTO3 drives a couple of months ago. We upgraded to Arcserve 11.5 at the same time, and, so far, so good.
Over the years, nearly twenty of them now, we've used:
20MB cassettes (20MB was a big disk in those days!)
DC600
DC2000
DC525
DDS
DDS2
DDS3
DDS4
DLT IV
LTO1
and finally (so far) LTO3.
Strongly agree with David re the Arcserve database engine; database issues were our biggest problem until we went to SQL server.
I can't give you any idea of costs, partly because I'm not involved in the money side of things, so I simply don't know what we pay, and partly because as an academic institution we qualify for various special pricing, bulk licensing schemes, etc. on most of the software we buy.
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