Old backup standbys show their strength in test

But newcomers make it interesting with fresh features

Enterprise backup-and-restoration products have grown sophisticated as they've been forced to accommodate a variety of operating systems and hard-disk filing systems, incorporate security parameters, and produce audit trails sufficient to meet compliance regulations.

We tested nine products designed to relieve the longstanding drudgery of backing up enterprise systems and to take on the newfound challenges of securely and compliantly protecting data.

Among the candidates, we found that an old standby, Symantec's Backup Exec, stands above the others for consistent backup and restoration in a variety of situations.

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Enterprise backup-and-restoration products have grown sophisticated as they've been forced to accommodate a variety of operating systems and hard-disk filing systems, incorporate security parameters, and produce audit trails sufficient to meet compliance regulations.

We tested nine products designed to relieve the longstanding drudgery of backing up enterprise systems and to take on the newfound challenges of securely and compliantly protecting data.

Among the candidates, we found that an old standby, Symantec's Backup Exec, stands above the others for consistent backup and restoration in a variety of situations.

Symantec was followed very closely by HP's OpenView Storage Data Protector, which has excellent core usability.

However, Acronis, Atempo, Avamar (bought by EMC during the testing cycle) BakBone and Yosemite Technologies made competition difficult, as each was able to accomplish server, client and branch backups and earned extra credit for usable security, audit trails and support for bare-metal machine cloning.

Much emphasis is placed in today's backup world on specific applications. Transaction-oriented, high or rapid data-delta applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, have a crop of products poised to provide high availability specifically for them.