Backup Exec has consistently been a top data protection choice for businesses of all sizes as it combines ease of use with an impressive range of backup and restore services.
With each new release, Veritas always introduces plenty of new features and Backup Exec (BE) 22 is no exception.
Centre stage is Microsoft 365 support allowing BE 22 to backup and restore Exchange Online and OneDrive data. Licensing has been simplified further as along with the Bronze, Silver and Gold options, Veritas has introduced a new subscription-based service.
The BE Simple licensing program allows SMBs to get running as quickly as possible. It consolidates all licenses into a single edition with all features enabled and metering is now based on instances which can be a physical system, a virtual machine or ten Microsoft 365 users.
Installation is swift as we loaded BE 22 on a Windows Server 2019 host in 20 minutes and used its intuitive console to deploy agents to our physical Windows servers - Windows Server 2022 is also supported as a host and backup target. It was even easier to add our Hyper-V host as after declaring it to BE 22, a remote agent was automatically installed while for VMware hosts, you provide their IP address and credentials.
Adding our Microsoft 365 account was incredibly simple and far easier than for some other backup solutions we've tested. To authenticate it, we copied the unique device code generated by BE 22, used the link provided to access our Microsoft 365 account and entered the code.
There's plenty of choice for backup destinations with support for physical and virtual disks, cloud storage, tape, deduplication stores and network shares. Along with creating a local backup vault, we defined a large capacity NAS share on a Synology NAS by declaring its UNC path.
Microsoft 365 backups require a deduplication store and we had no problems creating one on the BE 22 host. Valuable ransomware protection is provided for Amazon cloud storage with support for S3 buckets with Object Lock enabled and BE 22 offers further data store protection by blocking non-Veritas processes from writing to them.
BE 22 makes light work of job creation as you select source systems in the console and choose a predefined strategy from its drop-down menu. These include backup to disk or cloud and you can add multiple stages for local and offsite backup, migration to tape and replication to other disk stores.
For Microsoft 365 protection, you choose all or selected users, groups and public folders and decide whether to secure user's mailboxes, archive mailboxes and OneDrive data. We selected our local deduplication store as the destination, added a schedule and watched BE 22 create a 'Forever Incremental' job.
A key feature is all Microsoft 365 protection services are integrated into the main BE 22 administration console. Furthermore, unlike a number of competing products, Veritas allows businesses to retain sovereignty over where their Microsoft 365 backup data is stored.
Data restoration is also simple as we could view files, folders and volumes on selected sources, pick a recovery point and decide where to send them. We found Microsoft 365 recovery equally undemanding as we were able to browse our users, check entire mailboxes or select items such as a single email and restore individual files from their OneDrive accounts.
Product: Backup Exec 22 Supplier: Veritas Technologies Web site: www.veritas.com Sales: +44 (0)800 279 9810
VERDICT: Backup Exec is one of our favourite business data protection solutions and the new features in this latest version add even more appeal. It delivers complete protection for physical, virtual, multi-cloud and hyper-converged environments, integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and the new licensing schemes make it very affordable.