Discussion on:

Five reliable Windows Server backup solutions

I backup the server image itself once a month. The software that everyone uses runs on the server, but we backup the data daily separately on a network drive and then the company backs up the data daily on their servers which are three different locations across the U.S.

You have to use Windows Server Backup and it does not support tape drives.

As of server 2008 I use VSS with external drives ...

http://www.ntbackup.us/Articles/tape-vs-disk-backups.htm

Check out Autonomy, they bought IronMountain, Much better caching, de-duplication and compression than the above mentioned and the licensing for the vaults include the licensing for the backup vaults, and they now house over 27 Petabytes of the worlds information, completely analysed by IDOL. Better reporting, searching and it has a mobile agent for access to the vaults. It's like the Dropbox for everything enterprise and has been since before Dropbox.

Symantec NetBackup: A robust and reliable Windows based backup solution, missing from the list. It is available with multiple options and agents.

I used to like this one but recently, at a medical office, I ran a full backup of a critical folder on January 16 - thank god I did that because the incremental run the next day SET EVERY FILE SIZE TO ZERO!!! Incredible. Client was p/od and I was too. Only lost a few days of data but I am investigating this disaster before I EVER touch this again. Anybody else suffer this disaster???

Unitrends

For offices with small IT budgets, we have to get creative. I use Redgate SQL Backup for out SQL Servers, fast and effictive remote spindle d to d backups and restorations. Files are a different story. The savior here for file shares and document image libraries is a great inexpensive tool called Beyond Compare (rev 2, and now 3). It can be scripted via batch files and scheduled tasks to do a comparison of directories or files and copy only new or changed files. Additionally, another low cost utility, ExpanDrive allows me to use Beyond Compare in conjunction with ExpanDrive to run comparisons on a remote server and push or copy file changes to a remote backup server across the backbone.

Carbonite is $600 per year if you have a server, not $229. That price is for businesses without a server. If you're going to include Carbonite, you should mention Mozy Pro, which has better feature sets and support than Carbonite.

Has anyone heard of BackUp Assist? I am interested to know your thoughts on this platform, pros and cons.

I am currently running Symantec BackUp Exec and I really hate it. I do not find it all that easy to use and it is the last piece of the Symantec line that I need to remove from my system (antivirus and mail security have already been replaced with Sophos and I could not be happier!).

I am all ears...

I've heard that BackUp Assist is a good product. I haven't used it my self as I use ShadowProtect for all my servers and also use the IT edition for some computer repairs. It's hardware independent restore (HIR) is excellent and easy. Also it's incemental restores a simple and work. I highly recommend ShadowProtect for servers.

Over the years I have written and tweaked a couple backup scripts that use rsync to external drives.
For SQL I use the built in scripting commands to do full backups daily and transaction log backups hourly. These go onto the file server where the other company data are. Exchange servers are backed up using Symantec Backup Exec backup to disk (onto the same file server). Then at the designated time at night, the rsync script backs up the entire file server to externals which are swapped each day like tapes, one being kept offsite for security.
The advantage of using rsync is speed. Only the files that have changed need to be backed up. That is important if you are dealing with TBs of data.

I use JD backing up to Amazon AWS and I find their newer version with the Backup Bucket to be excellent.

I don't know why you would look any further than ShadowProtect. Easy to use, easy to verify it's working, easy to restore single files/folders, easy to restore the entire drive, and easy to setup a virtual running copy of the machine. Oh, yeah, you can also restore the entire system to a new computer with different hardward components. They also have great tech support!
It has saved me on more than one occasion. When I was playing with it on a new SBS 2008 server a few years ago, I was able to restore a newly installed copy of the entire server from backup in under 3 minutes! Yes, there was not client data on it, and with the data it would take longer, but, hey, 3 minutes!

ShadowProtect rules! Very reliable, very felxible yet dead simple to set up. Lets you run incrementals during the day then roll them up into a full, universal restore, it's got Exchange agents etc etc. It's priced very well too.

As you say though it's the restore side that I like. I would argue that most companies focus don't focus on the restore side enough. ShadowProtect has a great restore process. You boot into a PE environment and have great control over the restore. Easy to roll back to the latest full or any incremental, the universal restore is simple (just add drivers) when prompted by the wizard, and it's even smart enough to prompt you at the end if you included the wrong MSD driver which will cause the thing not to boot. The thing I liked best though was it has VNC built-in. So you can boot, choose VNC from the Tools menu, enter a password then start your restore running. Then rather than watching it until 3am you can go home and keep an eye on it. Once it's done you can then restore the incrementals without needing to be on-site.

I've used it for years and have been very happy with it. What sold me was the ability to do brick level backup of Exchange Mailboxes. But the features they have added over the last couple of years and the ability to backup to multiple types of platforms makes it even better now.

I was surprised to not see Arcserve or Arcserve D2D on the list.

Backup Exec still seems pretty good if you're using tapes. I'd rate it below a few other products, but it certainly worth considering.

If you're backing up to disk though I wouldn't consider it. We've had nothing but trouble with it at all our clients sites. It constantly needs hand-holding, the rules for things like retention are really complex (I'd love to just say 'store 5 full backups on this disk' but you can't - you need to carefully set values for media sets, retention, backup file size and overwrite settings, and even then it probably won't work right for you). It's also an expensive product. An agent to backup the system state and data for one server is over $1000AU. I can buy the much better ShadowProtect for half the price.

FYI
carbonite does work on windows server

FYI
Carbonite home does work on windows server

I was surprised that no one has mentioned Genie backup manger for servers, it's a great software, cheap compared to other softwares and yet the most reliable piece of program.

As of today 03/11/13
I have found out that BE 2012 does not work on MS server 2012 WTF?