Best Veeam alternatives?
Posted by edifus@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 118 comments
We are done with Veeam, and their ~~lack of~~ support. Their support teams are clueless and slow to respond. Our account manager doesn't care.
We've had problems with s3 storage in our environment going on 6 months now with no resolution from Veeam. SOBR tiering jobs fail, backup files get locked for no apparent reason which causes other jobs (tape, etc) to get stuck until someone notices (NBD usually). Checkpoint removal failures daily.
So.. what are the alternatives these days?
Critical-Cup3649@reddit
My recommendation after years of dealing with many tools and looking for tool simplicity is to go with Nakivo.
Easy setup, no messy services and single server or NAS device for the deployment.
You can use it for Local backups and copy to the cloud. I use perpetual licensing for a small number of Physical Machine backups but if you are doing VM backups it is way better with VM verification and Flash Boot for quick recoveries.
It’s a pretty tough competitor in my opinion.
mat-ferland@reddit
We’ve seen people move for all kinds of reasons, but the shortlist usually ends up being Rubrik, Cohesity, Commvault, and sometimes Acronis. I’d care less about the feature matrix and more about whether restores are solid and support shows up when things are on fire.
WheresNorthFromHere7@reddit
Veeam is on a short list of software we use that I can say I don't want to eject into the sun.
QuyetCompass@reddit
yeah that’s frustrating, especially when it drags on that long
veeam is usually pretty solid overall, but once you get into s3/object storage and sobr it can get weird depending on what’s sitting underneath it. i’ve seen similar issues where it ended up being more about the storage layer or how tasks were being handled than veeam itself
lately it seems like people moving off veeam are either going rubrik or cohesity if they want something more turnkey with better support, or druva if they’re leaning more cloud. nakivo comes up too for smaller setups
big tradeoff is usually flexibility vs simplicity. veeam gives you a lot of control, the others are more opinionated but easier to deal with day to day
out of curiosity, are you planning to stay on vmware or thinking about moving off that too? that seems to be driving a lot of these decisions right now
Rude_Art_6291@reddit
I ended up moving from VMware to Proxmox and paired it with Nakivo for backups.
D1TAC@reddit
I think that’s just a bad experience with VEEAM. We’ve been using it for years without issues. KBs are great & their forums are helpful. I’ve reached out to support a few times with them offering to do a zoom call and walk me through options. Request a different account manager.
Lost_Term_8080@reddit
The described symptoms are exactly what I have come to expect from veeam over the last 15 years - and if there are no errors, there is a good chance it is because the backups it is making are no good, or there is a problem silently growing
RCTID1975@reddit
That is an absolutely wild and absurd accusation that's not even remotely true.
Additionally, part of your backup process should be test restores.
If you're incapable of having any successful backups and restores with Veeam, I'd recommend looking at your setup and determining why.
Junior-Tourist3480@reddit
Veeam has the capacity to verify on each backup, correct? Either block level or file level checksum? And yes, a test restore should be a regular activity on any backup system.
man__i__love__frogs@reddit
Veeam Sure Backup even boots a VM backup in a sandbox, and you can run custom verification scripts to determine if it's working or not.
RCTID1975@reddit
Yes it does.
Lost_Term_8080@reddit
Not an accusation. Backups don't need to fail silently 100% of the time to not be trustable. They only need to be bad one time.
trail-g62Bim@reddit
Really? I'm not sure I can think of a less helpful product forum. I think every post I have ever seen results in "you file a ticket" and then no resolution ever being posted.
Doso777@reddit
I followed the Veamm forums when we didn't even use their software. It was the best ressource publicy available for a nasty ReFS problem that also affected Microsoft DPM and other software.
anonpf@reddit
Same. VEEAM has been rock solid.
sryan2k1@reddit
Rubrik all day, you're not going to like the price tag.
CP_Money@reddit
They wanted $50k for the smallest appliance they offer.
Trust_8067@reddit
That's pocket change in IT.
CP_Money@reddit
For a large company sure, not for an SMB.
sryan2k1@reddit
A deal at twice the price. We were paying more than that annually for our CommVault maintenance
CP_Money@reddit
Yeah, that's 10x more than what I am currently paying for the backup appliance solution I use right now.
Forgotmyaccount1979@reddit
Echoing that it works, but also costs.
Thankfully, my place of work has a lot of cash, and a lot of fear.
sryan2k1@reddit
It was cheaper than Commvault, for us anyway.
IceCubicle99@reddit
Is anything more expensive than Commvault?
malikto44@reddit
Veeam was. At a previous company I was at, the VAR gave Veeam and Commvault bids. Commvault came in as a price leader... and to boot, they came in without being billed for capacity.
IceCubicle99@reddit
Interesting, they must have had to get more competitive on price over the years then. Admittedly it's been quite a while since I priced Commvault out but the last time I did, the price was around 3-4 times what I ended up paying for Veeam.
Forgotmyaccount1979@reddit
Good to know, I'd certainly argue for keeping it if management wanted to find something cheaper.
Our only issue we have had was a bad account rep who got replaced shortly after he fed us a bunch of bad information.
jazzy095@reddit
Yup. +1 for Rubrik. Does our email too
Less-Draw414@reddit
Rubrik 10000% is the way to go
music2myear@reddit
We have Rubrik and the product is decent, but like many products, the sales people over-sold, claiming features and capabilities the product doesn't have.
We're currently considering moving to Veeam at some point soon.
Less-Draw414@reddit
Yeah it definitely isn’t cheap but the product works. Sorry you dealt with the wrong sales team but we got what we paid for. Veeam is def more flexible and supports broader range of platforms and cloud targets but for my team we value simplicity. If you have the funds I’d say go with Rubrik. Let me add Rubrik support is top notch!
Sorcerious@reddit
99% sure the OP is not the one involved with budgeting at all.
Ozwulf67@reddit
We are moving from Commvault HyperScale (Very large implementation) to Rubrik this year. Praying...
sryan2k1@reddit
We're 6 years in. A few minor bugs that support was very responsive for and had fixed within a few weeks. Overall it's been great.
Ozwulf67@reddit
Our Commvault Hyperscale has over 110 servers :(
Trust_8067@reddit
Commvault is the enterprise standard, but if it's too big/expensive for your environment, Cohesity is probably a decent alternative.
sryan2k1@reddit
Commvault is insanely powerful but also insanely hard to manage. Most people that used to use them have dumped em for Cohesity/Rubrik
ChadTheLizardKing@reddit
Cohesity is a good product but has some quirks, as all platforms do. One thing we learned was to stay away from the hardware appliances - the data volume on the hardware appliance is not agnostic to the hardware platform so if you have a hardware problem with the appliance, you have a problem with your backups. Site to site replication is not the same as moving the data volume either. Overall, not a reason to not choose Cohesity but something we learned that is not readily apparent from the sales demo or documentation.
yukantspel@reddit
I'm genuinely curious about the 'not agnostic to the hardware platform' bit. Can you elaborate a bit more?
ChadTheLizardKing@reddit
The hardware appliance is a multi-node HCI cluster in a single chassis - HPe or Supermicro when we bought in. The data volume cannot be directly copied out of that specific cluster onto another appliance - virtual or not. So, if you have a hardware problem in that HCI appliance, you are hostage to repairing that appliance. So, if you are looking at a total chassis failure, you have to organically grow the Cohesity volume onto another cluster one node at a time. I.e., add a node, grow the cluster, remove the failing node, rinse and repeat.
We went HPe but I would not do that again as hardware issues just become a bouncing ball between Cohesity and HPe.
It was something they were looking at for future releases (transporing a data volume to another cluster) but we ended up deprecating the need for it so it is non-critical now.
They do node-to-node replication but that is a function of the protection jobs - you can re-run replication for retroactively. Also, recovery is not so straightforward in that scenario.
Again, Cohesity is a great platform but there are bits and bobs that are not readily apparent until you start simulating, "Well what if the entire chassis failed", etc...
sryan2k1@reddit
We were CommVault customers and we looked at them a few years ago and ended up going with rubrik instead
ChadTheLizardKing@reddit
Yeah we did the comparison with Rubrik. We went Cohesity though it honestly could have gone either way.
thebigshoe247@reddit
I was voluntold to learn CommVault (I think it was Galaxy back then), at my first gig, so that's the product I just happen to know like the back of my hand, then learned all the other products after it.
I'm glad I learned it, but also glad I deal with Veeam now... Just easier and usually works.
Returns_are_Hard@reddit
We switched from Veeam to Commvault last year and I hate it. I miss Veeam sooooo much lol.
thebigshoe247@reddit
Learning Veeam and switching to CommVault, I absolutely understand. The things that make CommVault great are actually the things that make it terrible as well.
Returns_are_Hard@reddit
That is an excellent way to phrase it lol.
thebigshoe247@reddit
I remember they had developed a custom tool for me they called DirDiff. Not sure if it ever made it into prod or not, but CDR caused me many, many issues...
tin-naga@reddit
We're checking out Nakivo. Might think about Druva when they finalize Proxmox support.
TheHonkyTonkLlama@reddit
Been using Druva since 2020 and absolutely love it. VMWare here, but am itching to dump it an go ProxMox. Hopefully they get it cranking soon!
vawlk@reddit
been using it for years now.
philmcracken519@reddit
I liked Nakivo but the main GUI was always sluggish even after a few attempts with support to make it go faster.
But it is a pretty easy bolt on solution for an existing environment.
TxJprs@reddit
veeam is great, cohesity or rubrik are better
Down_B_OP@reddit
Hate to be that guy, but have you tried just spinning up a new Veeam server? I have had ~50 locations under my purview backing up with Veeam for about 5 years now and I give support a week to sort shit out then I just rebuild. Probably done it about 15 times during that period, but it's always worked out for me.
In general, I find Veeam to be the most reliable of the backup solutions I've used. Sorry to hear you have had such an awful time with their support.
xendr0me@reddit
So, having to rebuild a backup server 15 times in 5 years is considered "reliable"?
Flying-T@reddit
Over 5 years and 50 instances? Sounds fair to be honest.
Krigen89@reddit
That's a 6% annual rebuild.
I have no idea what an industry standard is or should be, but rounds high for me for backups failing. No?
Liquidfoxx22@reddit
We ran probably 60 VBR servers, numbers varying since the 6.5 days and I've probably rebuilt 5 over 11 years. One of those was a postgres migration that didn't work as expected, most were due to hardware failures. I think I've had to rebuild 1 after I'd mistakenly borked it myself.
I can't say I've ever had to rebuild one due to a fault of Veeam itself.
Down_B_OP@reddit
With that many locations over that period with some sites having dozens of backup jobs? I consider it reliable. Sometimes shit breaks. The only real showstopper I've run into with Veeam is odd hardware incompatibilities that support expected me to just be aware of. Maybe I'm just lucky or too patient, but I have a sweet spot for Veeam because it's generally just done what it is supposed to do and support has typically been good once I got past the script readers.
mautobu@reddit
I imagine you're not using immutable storage?
wantsiops@reddit
veeam s3 is like DDoS for s3, even when you goto 8MB blocksize.
shadhzaman@reddit
As bad as you think Veaam is, most other companies are worth. Most are offloading aupport to middle of nowhere untrained staff, or overworked staff who stopped giving a crap. Last week, Sentinel one's level 2 support sent me a link to log collection process after sending them the logs and asking them what they think. You had one bad experience with Veeam. It's still one of the most multi platform backup tools out there and 90% of my experience has been solid. Once in a while we hit the crap service and if we can't work around it, we talk to our rep and push it
rybl@reddit
We switched from Veeam to Cohesity a few years ago and it's one of the best decisions we've ever made. Cohesity's product is great and their support has been top notch anytime we have needed them.
mudd2577@reddit
I was going to say Cohesity, with Rubrik worth a good long look as well.
Enough_Pattern8875@reddit
It’s been a few years since I’ve used VEEAM, but unless something has changed, they have fantastic support.
I really hope this is an exception because I’ll be genuinely sad if VEEAM has gone the way of Nimble for support.
TheSpearTip@reddit
They're getting rid of their US-based engineers and replacing them with people in Costa Rica (for ROW its India) and heavily encouraging everyone to use their internal AI first, frequently and often during the troubleshooting process. Its a process that has been ongoing for a couple of years now but they've really stepped on the gas over the last few months including firing a bunch of people right before Christmas for made-up reasons. They're basically trying to make EBITDA look as good as possible prior to going public and to hell with customers, customer service or the consequences.
Solace_and_Sorrow@reddit
That sounds like a nightmare, especially with S3 issues dragging on that long. We actually moved away from Veeam after running into similar support issues, ended up going with Cohesity and it’s been a lot more stable for us so far. Also not a direct fix, but having a solid internal workflow for tracking these kinds of issues helps a ton, using something like Siit on the service desk side at least keeps things from getting stuck or going unnoticed while waiting on vendors.
Music_For_Miles@reddit
That sounds like a nightmare, especially with S3 issues dragging on that long. We actually moved away from Veeam after running into similar support issues, ended up going with Cohesity and it’s been a lot more stable for us so far. Also not a direct fix, but having a solid internal workflow for tracking these kinds of issues helps a ton, using something like Siit on the service desk side at least keeps things from getting stuck or going unnoticed while waiting on vendors.
Numerous_Platypus@reddit
Nakivo.
PlayfulSolution4661@reddit
We use Druva! They are GREAT
lbaile200@reddit
I’ve found if you’re not a big fish, veeam couldn’t give a fuck about you. We’re a small company, maybe 5mil/year and 25 employees and it took over a month to get a quote from them.
We ended up going with backup exec and an AWS tape gateway for backup jobs. It’s an old-fashioned workflow but it works, has held up without maintenance for 2 years, and crazy cheap.
SausageSmuggler21@reddit
CommVault probably has the features, but basically requires a couple of dedicated admins to learn/run.
Rubrik/Cohesity/Power Protect Data Manager (Dell) are great enterprise options that are relatively easy to learn/run, but each has their own quirks and they can be pricey. Plus, Rubrik/Cohesity might start struggling with supply with the rumored SuperMicro shortages.
Druva is easy to learn/run and pretty inexpensive. This is primarily a "backup to the cloud" solution. You could do have a local copy, but that's atypical and less necessary in most situations these days.
All I'm going to say about tape backup is that you should eliminate this from your process. You don't have to. There might be legitimate reasons to use tape, but from a holistic perspective, tape shouldn't be part of your process anymore.
mdj@reddit
Disclosure: I work at Cohesity. We have no appliances manufactured by SuperMicro. We use multiple vendors to build our servers, and so far no lead time issues. Cost is the same problem everyone else in the industry is facing.
Beyond that, you’re not limited to our appliances. We have configurations on HPE, Cisco, Dell, Lenovo, Fujitsu and SuperMicro, and your sales team isn’t going to care which of those you want. HPE and Cisco OEM is so you can order servers from them with Cohesity preinstalled. For the other vendors, we can give you a BOM with exactly what to order based on the sizing.
St0nywall@reddit
Honestly if you're dead set against Veeam, look at a Datto appliance. You get a lot more from it than Veeam. Veeam is financially viable because all you get with a Standard license is the ability to backup and Restore. With Enterprise licenses you can setup a SureBackup environment which emulates the Datto snapshot environment.
It's something to look into anyways.
Secret_Account07@reddit
We use IBM Storage Defender, but it’s Cohesity under the hood. Works great. We have thousands of servers and storage appliances. A lot of data. Since we migrated I have no complaints and only good things to say.
It’s funny because I’d also heard good things about Veeam from others but have never actually worked with the product
Trust_8067@reddit
Veeam is perfectly fine, but it's a small company and a basic app, so any type of strange, unique troubleshooting is going to be difficult unless it gets escalated to the engineers basically. They're just not mature enough either to have sound documentation for all the quirks and bugs, so you're going to have tier 1 support just reading of documents and not always able to find a solution.
Most likely OP just has a poorly designed or run environment, so they keep hitting self inflicted walls trying to get stable backups working.
tsmith-co@reddit
When’s the last time you used Veeam? That sounds like Veeam from 7 years ago - not today as a leading backup vendor.
Trust_8067@reddit
I've never used Veeam, I've specifically went out of my way to avoid wasting my time with backups in my career. However, you make a good point, I haven't done anything in terms of researching Veeam for a good 7 years.
tsmith-co@reddit
Not sure what the waste of time would be, but it’s def one of the most important parts of any datacenter. But if it’s not your focus - that’s understandable.
Yeah Veeam is now the #1 backup vendor according to multiple orgs that rate that kind of thing - and in just about every Fortune 500 company - but it used to be “for SMB only” back in the day - so that stigma has held on a bit.
Trust_8067@reddit
It's a waste of time because it wouldn't make me any more money, and as a storage engineer, my backup solutions are arguably better.
Secret_Account07@reddit
Interesting
I think I conflate their importance because there is a big Veeam building near me but I suspect it’s Vedas they are located here.probably hear about them more here than other places lol
Trust_8067@reddit
I've been told that my backup vendor knowledge is a bit outdated.
Arudinne@reddit
7000+ employees is Small?
Trust_8067@reddit
Yeah, that's tiny.
pm_me_domme_pics@reddit
You had to open a ticket with veeam? I literally never had a need to in the last decade of use
Shyssiryxius@reddit
We had veeam for 6 years. It had issued at least once a week. Some months it would fail daily.
Finally gave up and moved to a SaaS solution. That was too expensive and last year used AI to help us setup MABS. Hasn't skipped a beat.
Veeam might be great for some people, but in our environment it just wasn't happy.
cmack@reddit
Perhaps the issue is instead your onprem s3 compat vendor???
Tetravus@reddit
We moved from Veeam for similar reasons. We switched to Commvault about a year ago. No complaints so far.
signalcc@reddit
We have been on Veeam for the 7 years I have been with the company and I have worked with Veeam for over 12 years in total. They have been great.
I actually have a year old ticket but support contacts me once a week to let me know where things are with R&D. It has to do with S3 as well but ours is because our cloud provider forced us to move our S3 data to a different data center and it screwed up the DB. Security keys got hosed and some other things. Not Veeam’s fault, the cloud providers fault but Veeam is stuck fixing it. It’s been a long time but they are always working the issue. I have a call with the tomorrow as a matter of fact.
I have always had great response and support with Veeam
elatllat@reddit
https://alternativeto.net/software/veeam-backup/
Tr1pline@reddit
Synology nas built in backup apps.
dustojnikhummer@reddit
They are okay if you are a small company. You aren't gonna use S3 storage with Synology Active Backup for HyperV
clickx3@reddit
There is a course on LinkedIn Learning that compares a lot of these different products that may help you decide. It covers Windows, Linux, Commvault, Veeam, BU Exec, Arc, and others.
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/system-administration-backup-and-recovery-21776888/take-charge-of-your-network-backup-and-recovery
psiphre@reddit
fuck linkedin
Professional-Heat690@reddit
Same. Bailed out of that sht show a couple of years ago.. Massive downhill slide
dustojnikhummer@reddit
Wasn't there a massive data leak a week ago or so?
dremerwsbu@reddit
Check out WholesaleBackup. Excellent support from all US based team, low fixed per endpoint cost, white labeling, web console, and you can either self-host or easily pair it with Wasabi, B2, C2, or S3 cloud storage.
Lost_Term_8080@reddit
Commvault or veritas. If you are a small shop, backup exec. If you are a larger shop, you should probably consider commvault. The setup and configuration of commvault will be a steeper learning curve, but is extremely easy to manage once you have made that investment. Netback is easier to get going and learn, but is more support intensive and obscure backup problems can be really difficult to troubleshoot. To be fair, commvault can also be difficult to troubleshoot a particular problem the first time you have it, but the more issues to resolve on it, the more reusable skill you will have in troubleshooting future problems while learning how to troubleshoot something in netbackup generally means you learned how to troubleshoot that one specific issue and will have to learn how to troubleshoot the next specific issue as well.
KN4SKY@reddit
+1 for Commvault. It's definitely a steeper learning curve but they have great training resources. My only gripe is that a lot of functionality is still only available on the old Java console, so you'll essentially have to learn both the console and the web GUI.
Lost_Term_8080@reddit
The pricing is also relative - the last I used it, I supported 250 server backups by myself in about 20 different sites with less than an hour and a half a day of effort and on most days, everything was just successful. There were lots of sharepoint (absolutely horrible to backup), SQL and Exchange backups in that. If your backup guy can do something other than backups most of the day its getting another staff member for free.
Liquidfoxx22@reddit
I've not looked at Backup Exec since we moved to Veeam back in 7.x - is it even a comparable product? The last time I looked at it, it was probably BE2016 or something, it's Hyper-V backup was temperamental at best, and still used file-based backup instead of image-based, so took forever.
Lost_Term_8080@reddit
Its actually EOL. The december 2024 release of it was it.
kristheb@reddit
backup exec is eol
Lost_Term_8080@reddit
So it is. I checked to see if it was still around and saw a recent release, didn't see that it was the final release
smokie12@reddit
We've tested NetBackup and decided to keep using Microsoft DPM. Yes, it's that bad.
Lost_Term_8080@reddit
Probably not a fair comparison test or your org is really not at the scale of needing netbackup.
I am no netbackup fan, I would always go with commvault, but as is the case with any enterprise scale backup, you cannot under resource it, cannot try to get away with time saving deviations in configurations and over time you just need to make tweaks to the targets and backup settings to make it run reliably
Big-Ambition-6124@reddit
I have nightmare's using netbackup. Was one of my happiest moments getting rid of them.
TechSupportIgit@reddit
You could look into Acronis? Don't have much experience with S3 buckets but with their cloud monitoring I'm sure they'd support S3 bucket backups.
kingpoiuy@reddit
Veeam's been great for us. Sorry to hear your experience hasn't been.
anuragism@reddit
You can try Druva.
BVladimirHarkonnen@reddit
We started using them in our shop and so far so good.
ICameHereForThiss@reddit
Rubrik
idkau@reddit
Why aren’t you using 13.x? You don’t care about the high risk sec vulns? Veeam support as a whole is great. We wait maybe 10 minutes for support.
Ancient-Bat1755@reddit
I finally got my ticket resolved for s3 wasabi timeouts, I escalated to our rep who escalated to an engineer. Try using the escalate to manager feature.
Various support techs kept saying we needed to buy another 24 cores and 32gb ram for a server that doesnt use 30% of those resources ever…
The s3 registry key previous tech gave of 10 tasks was too low, it was changed to 32 and fixed our issue (and set repository to 2 tasks)
HJForsythe@reddit
They told me the exact same thing about our ceph offloads so we put in very expensive CPUs and the performance didn't change at all.
psiphre@reddit
i'm a smaller shop but i have and like cohesity. it mostly works, the support is mostly good.
cubic_sq@reddit
Had similar issues last year. We have up. And started to move customers to alternatives. Only have 5 left on veeam now. From over a hundred…
wireditfellow@reddit
Altaro VM backup if you want budget friendly solution. It is pretty decent.
mautobu@reddit
I'm curious about your environment. Do you care to go into details? Or maybe just the jobs? I use Veeam extensively. We tier from both on prem s3 and file storage up to azure blob storage. There have been numerous issues, but support had always been solid for me. I'm sure I've got over 60 closed cases with them and typically receive a response the same day even for sev 4 cases.
I recall an issue tiering from cool storage to archival. We had a policy in our tenant that disallowed connections to blob storage from anything but our on prem internal subnet. The SOBR appliance pulled an IP from our tenant subnet and wasn't allowed to connect. Could be a similar issue?
Sounds like your org has made the decision to dump it. I'm not here to change your mind, but I am curious about the technical side.