Third party BackUp software for small business

Hi,

wondering what commercial backup products you use and/or recommend for small business with a number of workstations (1-5) and one windows server (and on the odd occasion an Exchange server)? Guideline price would be helpful.

Any products I have seen have been very costly for the server (Exchange agents in particular).

Thanks in advance.

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Comments

it_consultant

What is the budget like? Honestly, most backup softwares are about the same price depending on capability.

ptilsen

ShadowProtect. Use it, learn it, embrace it, and never turn back. If you're a small MSP/consulting firm, you can usually get a reseller account to provide it to your clients at a reasonable price with a markup.

it_consultant

Shadow protect is like $900 per license, its not that cheap, and the recovery manager for exchange is extra.

KenC

Budget would be $80 per workstation, more for the server version, but nowhere near $900. I'm thinking backup software should be around the same price as antivirus software per client.

TLeTourneau

Maybe Paragon Software for Business - partition manager, drive backup & hard disk manager server? Thier price point seems closer to your requirements.

localhost

Have you looks at bacula? It is mostly command line but there are gui versions also. The best part is that it's open source.

SteveLord

Paragon or Acronis for sure.

ptilsen

it_consultant wrote: »

Shadow protect is like $900 per license, its not that cheap, and the recovery manager for exchange is extra.

Small Business Server edition is $495, and there is a version that's $995 for the SBS license and 10 workstation licenses. I can tell you as a fact that the MSP edition is MUCH cheaper.

Yes, the MSRP on ShadowProtect Server edition is about $900 per license. The actual cost you pay should not be near that unless you are a small business not using SBS. The workstation edition MSRP is only $90 a seat, and it's less if you buy a ten pack. Once again, it's much, much less if you get an MSP license.

The Exchange recovery software is only a convenience, really. If your backup is functioning you will always be able to recover Exchange from the image. Yes, direct Exchange recovery from a fun GUI interface will save you time, but a working volume backup means you can run export-mailbox in a virtual environment.

If you want to go any cheaper, Windows Backup works and it's free. Backup software, especially in the SMB market, is a dime a dozen, and most of it, well, sucks. I don't recommend ShadowProtect for no reason. It is rock solid stable, highly manageable, fast, secure, and feature-rich. In the event you have to do a recovery, I can tell you from experience that recovery times are anywhere from 50% to 1000% faster using ShadowProtect than, say, Windows Backup, NT Backup, or BackupExec.

ConradJ

Genie!

Genie9 (Formerly Genie-soft) | Backup, Restore & Disaster Recovery Solutions for Windows

KenC

ConradJ wrote: »

Genie!

Genie9 (Formerly Genie-soft) | Backup, Restore & Disaster Recovery Solutions for Windows

Have you used this yourself or did you just do a google search? I had the displeasure of trying to work with this (it was provided with a NAS drive) in the past, I'd consider it one of those dime a dozen products that ptilsen referred to. I won't be using it again, that's for sure.

Will take a look at bacula, thanks.

ConradJ

It's a shame you had issues with it, we use it a lot at work and have never had any issues. Which version did you use, do you recall?

NewManSoon

+1 for Bacula.. just read the manual before diving into configuration.

KenC

ConradJ wrote: »

It's a shame you had issues with it, we use it a lot at work and have never had any issues. Which version did you use, do you recall?

Genie BackUp Manager (not sure of the version) which shipped with a Lacie drive - issues with all the software that was supplied with drive and that app was no exception, so bad experience overall. I do know the drive itself is working fine (and still is afaik).

geek12

Handy Backup Server costs around 600$ for 5 workstations with exchange server agent included and more.