What needs improvement with Veritas Backup Exec?

The initial installation needs some effort.

From a licensing perspective, there's room for improvement. Previously, we had a license that could support both virtualization and databases within virtual machines. This meant a single license would cover both. Now, with the simplified license model, it only covers VMs. So, if there's one thing that could be definitely improved, it's the licensing model.

Veritas Backup Exec's dashboard feature could be enhanced.

Veritas Backup Exec's support services could be faster.

Veritas Backup Exec should improve by having a user portal that customers can use.

The solution can be improved by adding the ability to restore individual mailboxes. Currently, the solution does not have the capability to restore a single mailbox, so you lose a lot of time having to restore for example ten mailboxes just to recover one.

The tape library management tool needs improvement. The solution is not good for virtual backups because antiviruses write on the disc in blocks and the high number of changes or flags increases backup times. Agents should not be installed on top of VM because they cause discs to get overloaded and that is costly. Managing collapsed discs should not have any effect on the size of backups. The solution should be able continue increments and manage restorations without errors similarly to how Veeam handles the process. Active Directory restorations should not require an agent or additional things. The solution is too heavy and complex with 1,000 menus and options that make it messy rather than lightweight.

Veritas Backup Exec could improve the analytics. If there were some more detail in our scan reports it would be beneficial.

We need to have duplication and better compression. We don't really get that with Veritas. There's customer demand for it. We'd like to see some better synchronization between the office and other sites. There's room for improvement in off-site syncs.

I wish that they have an outlet for the other products from Veritas built into the Backup Exec product. For example, Backup Exec does only server backup. Currently, it is possible to read the backup of one other product, but if they can add more products so that you can just go into the dashboard of these other products by clicking on a button within the Backup Exec product, it would be great. They should also increase the number of applications that it is backing up currently.

It doesn't support the AIX platform. I've had a little problem in the tape solution in the Backup Exec. When you use a tape solution, take a backup in the tape, not in the disc, and restore it, there is a little complexity. It's not really user-friendly in that aspect.

Whenever a job fails, it would be a great improvement to be able to resume the job from the job got failed that feature. Suppose a job was started this morning and that it is going on while there are interruptions like network issues, server restart issues, server connectivity issues, services stopping, etc. For some reason, let's assume that the job failed or that it was mistakenly canceled by another person. It will be a great improvement if that failed job can be continued automatically or as a manual task. Exchange backup restoration takes a long time. Restoring a single email from the backup entire database is virtually occupies the entire system disk and it is huge pain. So, exchange email restoration should be simplified. Some time no reason some backups are getting failed after certain percentage, if I run the job again manually one by one then it will run successfully from one particular server. Additional ransomware protection mechanisms could also be added.

Other solutions have Kubernetes-specific solutions within them. This doesn’t. In the future, we may need the product to have that, however, in my environment, I don't have Kubernetes, so for my use, it is not necessary. It may be useful if it was easier to access. The reports could be made in an easier way.

The scalability could be improved even though the solution is targeted to small customers.

The console of Veritas Backup Exec is complex when compared to other software. The solution has a lot of tabs, so it is not neat and clean, causing confusion. The console dashboard needs to be simplified to help the customer, together with more training.

I would like to improve their ability to back up the cloud environment. Additionally, it would be nice to have a simpler UI.

One area that needs improvement is SQL backup. Backup Exec doesn't support higher availability. Higher availability is when you have two servers that can fail over each other. Veritas can’t back up sql when it’s on high availability

The one thing which could be improved, which we have informed Veritas about, is the ability to plug in to the cloud. Meaning, instead of using local storage if we're backing up a small user or end user, we want to be able to make it so they can direct the backups directly to the cloud. It can't be done at the moment. We can only back up to the storage then replicate to the cloud, but we cannot use the cloud as a source of storage. In terms of features, myself and my team are quite happy with most of the features. The only feature which we need is the plugin to the cloud. That's it. They've been doing a lot of improvements. The other part which they need to look at is the replication feature. In this case, we're talking about replicating between server to server. We do have a lot of competition from Veeam because of that. A lot of people want to have one server in the production side and one server at the other side, and replicate the servers across.

We've experienced some performance issues with Backup Exec. The backup jobs take too long to complete. And in the future, I'd like to see the option to export backups to the cloud, so we have more room and protection.

Technical support could be better. In most cases, we must learn and resolve issues on our own. There is no training provided, and their technicians are unaware of the features that are available.

The solution does not come with many issues, although the configuration of certain solutions on Windows should be addressed. The EDR should be looked at, as the operating system is too weak.

In one console, you will see a variety of things. In my opinion, it should be simple and straightforward. It is currently a little complicated. It is not straightforward to click the drives. Even assigning the tapes to the media pole is difficult when compared to Veeam. Some of the steps, are to assign, create a set, then a media set, for example. In the future, their console should not be complicated. For example, When you compare with Veeam it has multiple columns on one side itself where you can browse all of the features. With Veritas, it is not like that at all, it goes to the next window, then the next window, and continues that way to view the features.

It is currently missing the dynamic backup feature for virtual machines, which is available in NetWorker. I can create politics in NetWorker to add virtual machines with specific tags, but I cannot do this in Backup Exec, which is a minus for me. Currently, a user has to send a request to the Backup Administrator to add a machine to the backup, but I should be able to create rules to automatically add a new machine to the backup. This kind of functionality is very important in current times, especially when we are using cloud solutions. I should be able to create more than one stream in a policy and specify how many streams I want to run in parallel in one policy. Currently, I have to manually create more policies to back up more than one virtual machine at the same time. Their support can also be improved in terms of response time.

The solution could improve by having better documentation.

Ultimately, the product did not sell enough to keep the contract live. The solution lacked local support, which became an issue for us and our customers. They needed to have more presence on the ground. The deployment process was very difficult. The pricing was quite high. We tried to sell it as software as a service, however, clients preferred to have their own product.

The deduplication feature can be improved.

I would like to see more flexible deployment with fewer devices.

The pricing could be improved.

I have experienced some errors. From time to time the backup of one VM fails.

They need to make sure that they follow the technology and update in general to be up with modern technologies. The backup is not robust enough when you have a lot of technology.

We are not able to initiate our endpoint device backup on it. For the endpoint devices, I have to depend on the DLO. We need more integration capabilities. There needs to be an integration process of the endpoint devices so that we don't have to redo everything for different products.

The pricing is an area of improvement and the mode of marketing it.

Its scalability should be improved.

We had issues during the installation. The solution is affected by internet congestion. It requires quite a bit of bandwidth in order to really work effectively. The pricing of the solution is a bit high. We've found the scalability to be a bit limiting.

The product needs to be consistent. Within the process itself, a lot of times it will hang on the jobs and you have to then restart all the services to get it to release. The job rate sometimes just randomly will tank. Therefore, you have to stop jobs and restart them in order to get them back at a quicker pace. Those are probably the two worst features. Something within the software itself isn't quite right. There may be a bug or glitch. It will work fine for weeks and then all of a sudden it just tanks.

It would be better if it were possible to maintain the information that is in the cloud. The integration with SaaS applications like Office 365 needs to be improved.

What I didn't like about it is that sometimes, even though it says that it's successful, there are some bugs in it — it's not really successful. Sometimes, I would do a backup and it would say that it was successful but then when I tried to restore it, it's not in the catalog to restore. Then I have to go digging into my email to see if I have a copy of that catalog, then go and find it and restore it. In short, I think there is an issue with the cataloging. Other than that, it runs pretty fine. If you keep it for too long and the catalog gets really big, the application tends to move slowly because of how big the catalog and the database is getting. We kept on upgrading to the newer version; after a while, it just began to move slow, even if we updated and imported the catalog and the data.

They can improve the reporting component. The reports aren't user-friendly at all. You have to download them to Excel to get statistics.

I think that the one place the product could improve the most is in user-friendliness. If you compare it with Veritas' NetBackup, for example, that difference is pretty clear. They could take a lesson from their own products. Capability-wise the Backup Exec product is very good, but the lack of user-friendliness means people struggle to find and use some of the interesting features that would otherwise benefit from. They will miss utilizing those capabilities. Reporting capabilities are not up to the standard of other products. If you compare the reports which we get from NetBackup, those contain a lot of information that we need and do not get with Backup Exec. By comparison, the Backup Exec reports are pretty simple. Better reporting capability and a more user-friendly design would greatly improve usability.

This is a very good product. I've been comparing it to some DR solutions, there are some products that include disaster recovery which Veritas is lacking for now. It's possible that they will include it in the next release. We're looking for something with a DR backup.

In the past, it was not user-friendly. But nowadays it's very user friendly. But it could be better if it had a web-based interface. A web console would be great because nowadays a lot of products are web-based and you can access the console from various environments. So I would recommend bringing this feature in the next solution. I want to have a user-friendly interface for virtualization. Now virtualization doesn't have an extra interface. A great interface would be good. And maybe it would be better if they launched a virtual appliance.

The price of this solution is very high. It has a lot of features, but it is still kind of expensive for emerging markets, for example, in Africa. The problem comes from the fact that it costs more to back up the data than it is actually worth. A client may ask: "Why should I spend ten thousand dollars to back up data that is worth only two thousand?" They need to have a customizable license, or a different license for countries with emergent markets, such as Nigeria. Nigeria is a very big market, with a population of two hundred million, but it is also a competitive market and products need to be priced competitively in order to remain. I would like to see an unlimited appliance that does not have a backup limit. If I have a customer who chooses to use the backup appliance then they should not be limited to, for example, ten terabytes.

The user interface needs improvement. When comparing the user interface to other backup and replication products, it is greatly lacks in UI. In some cases when I have an error, I need to use the command line. I prefer to have access to the logs of different services through UI and even to the services itself.

I have found the duplication to be very poor. It is not clear how to automate processes using the command line interface. I would like to be able to create a restore task that can be scheduled so that the same restore action will be performed automatically. As it is now, if I want to restore the same resource or the same system for testing then I have to create a job task from scratch. Having an automatic restore would save me time. The problems I have had seem to be related to integrating the solution.

The price of this solution is a bit high. Expanding is difficult because if I want to add, for example, a terabyte of data, then I have to buy a disk shelf and it will cost me a lot.

The licensing packet is confusing. If Veritas could do a better job of clarifying it, that would be helpful. For example, if you have a mixed environment of Linux and Windows, you end up buying too many licenses. If you compare it to Veeam, for example, it allows you to buy one simple license that you can use on all of your operating systems. They've made it very simple. The industry trend is moving towards hyper-converged and a regular pay-as-you-go model with more simplified resources. Users are looking for a plug-and-play kind of solution. Veritas should move towards this as well.

The interface could use improvement.

This product is very geared toward a Microsoft environment, but there are many applications apart from Microsoft. Better integration with non-Microsoft products would be an improvement. I would also like to see more support for Hyper-V environments and NoSQL databases.

We occasionally have false positives, but the solution certainly has a good configuration. In terms of improvements, I think the pricing model could be improved. They charge you by port, for every port that you have even if you're not using all of them. The solution could integrate better with the firewall so that we could block ports that are under attack or compromised. I know that Portnox has this, but I don't think it's something that's really built-in. There are scripts that you have to perform. But if it was more integrated, it would be easier.

I cannot tell right now. I have probably eight years of influence and experience with this product, so it's difficult for me to be accurate here. Maybe they could improve reporting capabilities and predictions. I would also advise them to shift more towards open source. They should think about changing their server from Windows to open source. It's not an easy job, but I feel that their next step should involve shifting to that direction.

I would like to see a more powerful and effective processor in the appliance. Compared to other vendors, there are features that you will find not included in Veritas.

The cost is quite high. Along with the general costs, the supposed agents that you have to buy for the various options that you want to use ends up driving the costs higher as well. There was also one time when I tried to use the disaster recovery option, which didn't go very well. There needs to be an improvement in this feature. Originally, I used the trial version to see how well it will come out before I went in for the full license, and because it went so bad I did not continue with it. It would be helpful if the solution had disaster recovery for cloud options.

This solution does not support image-level backup of a physical server. The backup and restore process should be faster.

A lot of backup solutions are coming out now and a lot of new disaster recovery software is coming. We should see an updated cycle in six months or one year. Veritas Backup Exec should be more user-friendly. The costs should also be much lower and it should be easier to go through the disaster recovery process. This solution has been working perfectly for us for many years now. I did not encounter any major problems or issues with it during production. We need some more added value to this software, i.e. better disaster recovery.

I would like to see them improve on faster restoration. Currently, it takes a long time to restore my data.

First, it would be nice to improve the cloud. Second, it would be nice to improve the backup acceleration and the fast restoration required. This solution just doesn't meet my business needs for backup plans. Lastly, the reporting needs improvement. Backup Exec does not have the strong art of reporting tools, because we sometimes have to get more than six months or an annual based report.

Enhanced support for cloud backup needs to be added. However, offsite backup to the cloud can be done. The recovery success rate is not very convincing.