Backup Central

I'd appreciate recommendations on ArcServe vs Backup Exec for Small Business Server premium. The server runs SQL Server, Exchange and file services for our 10-employee business. We will backup to ESATA drives.

We've had ArcServe 11.5 in and found that the ArcServe services would not allow us to dismount the ESATA drive unless we took down the services. This is not a show stopper but is an inconvenience. Reliability is the top priority.

I plan on doing a rotation of four drives, writing a full backup and 4 differential backups to the same drive for a week, then swapping in a new drive and taking the drive offsite.

Thanks,
wielager

I got on the ARCserve 12.5 beta program, which ended not too long ago.

Thing is 12.5 has DeDupe so you can fit a lot more on disk.

What it does is keep a record of all the data blocks backed up. If a block currently being backed up matches one previously backed up then the index is updated pointing to the prior copy and the data in not written to disk again.

I did not test it with an external hard drive so I can't say if it will let you swap drives with the Tape Engine running but my guess is that it will be necessary to restart the Tape Engine.

In version 12.0 they moved device configuration into the startup of the Tape Engine so it is much better at handling configuration changes. Still I don't know if it can pickup the backup device swap on the fly. After all it is talking SCSI and SCSI was not designed for that type of thing.

You can also use disk staging. In this case you can leave the drive with the DeDupe device permently attached and then it will auto matically migrate the data to you other drive. When migrating the data the DeDupe process is undone and all the data in the backup is copied to the destination.

Neither. Try BackupExec System Recovery instead.

You'll need that and the GRO option to get some cool Exchange recovery features that are unique to Symantec.

It was designed for disk based backups and does a great job of tracking when disks get plugged in and out of a system. The baremetal recovery features of it are excellent as well. Much better than BackupExec itself and CA.