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Why not use Microsoft Backup

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by seth

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Okay I've been in IT for a few years, but in the last 2 years I've been the only IT guy in a small company. Every place I ever worked used the Vertias, the gold standard for Backup. I'm in a situation where I'd like to save a few bucks on a backup operation and I want to know why everyone seems to use 3rd party backup solutions. Is there a problem with the MS Server provided backup?

Thanks,

Seth

6 replies

by charliespencer

I don't think there's anything technically wrong with it, but it lacks features some find useful / important.

MS Backup doesn't have an integrated scheduling utility; you'll have to use the Scheduled Tasks utility. It doesn't maintain a media catalog, so there's no overwrite protection or other media management. It won't merge multiple drives into a pool. I don't think it will back up a remote system. The last time I looked at it, you could not back up to a CD / DVD drive, disk partition, logical drive, or another server; it required a locally connected physical tape backup device.

It may be an inexpensive solution for a single-server, single-backup-drive, single-operator operation. It also has the advantage of being a default application, so the backups have some degree of portability between Windows systems. In a disaster recovery scenario, you don't have to find a system running a third-party solution to recover your data.

If you're not using it or Veritas, what are you using? MS Backup isn't great, but it's a lot better than nothing.

by seth

I inherited a system only to find that the previous IT guys was using trial verisons of software to do backups. As a consequence nothing's been backed up in over a year. I'm trying to save the company a little cash for this quarter, so I asked this question.

by Member 30634329

The best part about MS Backup is that it is free.
It does not have all the bells and whistles that third-party backup programs have.
Its interface leaves a lot to be desired, and in order to use it properly you need to have a good understanding of its NTBACKUP.EXE command line as well as using Windows Scheduled Tasks.
Even though we have third-party backup software now, we can't back up all data on all servers directly to tape with agents.
So I still use NTBACKUP to stage server backups to a central network shared location that then gets backed up with Veritas to tape.

by kevindrew

Most people that use Veritas in the small & medium business environment do so because they need one or more of the add-ons that you can get for Backup Exec. Such as the Exchange or SQL server add-ons. If you use NTbackup to back up a server running exchange, you have to stop the Exchange services prior to your backup and restart them after your backup so as to be able to back up the Exchange information stores. Similar situation applies to SQL as well.

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