I’m currently using Carbonite for customer backups but It’s been unreliable for Hyper-V, and servers. I currently use Solarwinds RMM and Tom seems to like Solarwinds Backup which does incorporate with Solarwinds RMM. I’m testing it now. I see a lot of you are using Veeam.
What do you all recommend?
Have not tested Veam, but Solarwinds backup is solid.
1 Like
Using Veeam at home and at work with VMware, works a treat and has no real issues. Home it runs in a VM backing up to an SMB share, work it runs on bare-metal (R720XD) backing up to the local RAID.
Haven’t used it with Hyper-V since I moved off of that at home, but from what I recall there were no issues and it still comes recommended. I believe there are some MSP tie in options, but I have no experience personally with those.
Not an MSP so no experience with Solarwinds unfortunately.
Veeam’s Community Edition has few restrictions and will backup Hyper-V just fine. The only limit IIRC is that you can only backup 10 VMs. Spin both up and see which fits better for your use.
CrashPlan by Code42 for a few customers. Works well. May be worth investigating.
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
I think crashplan was bought out by Carbonite.
Assuming some of the servers are Windows, what about the optional feature Windows Server Backup?
I’m just getting it going now, so no real experience, but I’m pretty sure it can back up Hyper V hosts and VM’s. At least it looks good from the bare metal backup that I’ve been creating. Need to wait until more people go home for break to test restoring them.
Actually, they are all Windows servers.
I think you’re right. I should just backup the VMs to a local drive via Windows Backup.
And also backup the files within the VMs via Solarwinds so that I have cloud backups as well.
Hi Mark, we use veeam Backup in the company to backup hyperV (not native the os, you Need an agent) up to 10 vitual machines, based on an hyperv server it is free (Community Edition) licence count 1 per virtualized server. Backup the native is (windows server of win10pro Client, physical, needs 3 licences. Community Edition 10 licence Points (3 per agent, natively, 1 licences count per virtualized machine on hyperv or veeam.
Regards mike
Code42 purchased CrashPlan.
Veeam is by far one of the best Backup products out there. It is also not cheap 
We have it deployed at lots of sites in Physical/HV/Vsphere setups and has some amazing features. You can try it out using Community edition but tbh we sell it on as part of our offerings and have been using it for years. Got many clients out of serious problems.
FYI, Code42 (company name) was rebrand of Crashplan Product line but they rolled back to calling it Crashplan, got to love marketing spend on that one. Bascily 99% of people kept calling it Crashplan. Carbonite was pushed as an alternative for Crashplan Personal when they canned it leaving many people high and dry with archives they could never open again.
It should also be noted it much more of a file level backup tool ie. not bare metal restore tool. We used to have it on road warriors/laptop users and File shares client level backups but now we are fully 365/GSuite at all client we stopped using it for endpoint backup.
We have it on a few servers doing onsite/offsite file share backups and in place now mainly for file retention policy on the archives. Overall we are moving away from C42/CPP fully.
Looks like I’m moving to Solarwinds Backup. I’m testing it now and with the help of the Solarwinds staff. It looks pretty good. There are some really cool capabilities. If Tom likes it it’s gotta be good!
Do all of these handle full backups of your Windows Server Active Directories? I ran into a problem more than 10 years ago with Clonezilla not handling everything properly, upon restoration the AD saw different hardware (new hard drive) and refused to work (don’t remember the errors). Since then I’ve just been kind of flying blind and it may have been the last time I was able to buy servers and just started from scratch. The from scratch fixed up a bunch of issues and I’m probably going to do it again if/when I can replace my DC servers, but having good backups to fall back on is always a good plan.
Why would I go through and do from scratch? I can clean up a bunch of messes (again), and we are changing from one domain name to another and that’s one way to handle the DNS. I’m also going to move from a class C to a class B address range which can avoid possible conflicts with the larger campus network, they do not use any class B, only class A and class C so it gets me far away from their address ranges. And yes I know this from scratch methodology is the lazy way doing things, I should be fixing the messes directly. But having servers that started life as 2008R2, then upgraded to 2012R2, and then to 2016, and one of them to 2019 leaves a lot of junk behind. Most are still 2016 for this reason.
Can’t speak for anything but Veeam, it handles AD fine. I believe you can even restore objects from backup.
We use both in all cases. Both are best of breed products.
We use Veeam locally for Business Continuity backups.
We use MSPBackup (Solarwinds backup) for Disaster Recovery backups. We only do flat file backups to keep the speed up.
Our theory is that all business need business continuity with there backups, but trying to layer off site disaster recovery to it is an unnecessary expense in many ways. Most business will not care at all that they can not get there servers back on line in a couple of days if there server room is burned, flooded, wiped out, hit by an asteroid.
5K endpoints
30 staff MSP
very high OML
I went with Veeam. It’s cheap and it works. I have it backing up my Linux and Windows Servers to a nas drive and to the cloud. If you are just wanting to backup systems at home the Veeam backup agent is free. I paid for Veeam so I can get the centralized management console and the ability to backup to the cloud. I’m using Wasabi as my cloud repository. Their support is the best I’ve experience from any company and I highly recommend them.
BTW, I actually tested the Veeam restoring my Ubuntu 2004 workstation from bare metal. It restore everything perfectly.