Symantec Backup Exec 2010 review

Symantec doesn’t have any published claims about ratios and savings so to test these we called up our own set of tests specifically developed to look at deduplication performance. We used a 4GB data set with 1,000 files and introduced controlled changes within a percentage of the files during a simulated standard backup strategy consisting of daily incrementals and weekly full backups.

After the first full backup was completed, two per cent of the data was modified in 40 per cent of the files prior to each subsequent backup. Using BE2010’s reporting facilities we saw that after a two-week simulation it achieved a deduplication ratio of 3.6:1 showing reasonable storage savings. ARCserve proved to more efficient as in exactly the same test it returned a ratio of 5.3:1.

We also tested deduplication by backing up the system drives on four Windows client systems. The total amount of data backed up was 35.5GB but the datastore only contained 23GB of data resulting in an initial deduplication ratio of 1.6:1 and a storage saving of 35 per cent.

We weren’t overly impressed with the reporting facilities for deduplication as all BE2010 offers are summaries of these jobs showing storage statistics, performance plus achieved ratios and another for the deduplication device.

ARCserve’s reporting is more sophisticated as it provides graphs and pie charts showing nodes involved in deduplication, storage savings over time and historical data. In fact, ARCserve’s reporting tools generally provide a lot more information about all things backup related.

This latest version of Backup Exec delivers an impressive range of new features and adding deduplication services finally brings it in line with much of the competition. Unlike ARCserve, this is optional feature but still good value if you want the extra support for client-side and third party deduplication storage devices.