Backup Exec alternatives for 2003 Exchange?

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Spartacus

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We have a new customer that we originally thought was running SBS2003, but it turns out it's 2003 Server with 2003 Exchange and 2005 SQL installed separately. All of that for a 3-4 person office. Yep, their last IT guy ripped them big time.

They need backup software and I'm looking at Backup Exec, but the prices for Backup Exec plus the Exchange Agent are crazy.... like $1300 from what my partner said she priced it at.

We would like to find an alternative for Backup Exec that is reasonably priced but can still do the granular restores in Exchange like Backup Exec can do, restore a single mailbox or just the contacts etc.

BTW, the customer is not even using the SQL server so we don't need to backup any SQL data.

Any suggestions?
 
for 3-4 people, Id just rebuild there server with plain 2003 Server and get them Exchange hosted mailboxes from an outside host., that way that company can deal with restores, etc
for 3-4 people, how big is are the users mailboxes?
 
have you looked into some offsite backup? could do something like jungledisk + amazon s3 for very cheap, could also do Mozy Pro for somewhat cheap. depending on how much data they have it may be more cost effective to do a strictly offsite/online backup compared to costs of software + tapes.

may also be cheaper to buy SBS2003 and install it and reconfigure, then use the built in backup progarm or get Backup Exec SBS

also its probably not even legit software on that server, ive walked into a few jobs wheres its the same way, pirated server 2003 enterprise, pirated exchange. o well =)
 
First thing to do is verify that the software is in fact legit and that they have the licenses for it. They very well could be but I've seen my share of stuff that isn't as well.

Yosemite is going to be about the same price.

I mean you can backup exchange with ntbackup but I've never really messed with it. I guess you could always do that to the hard drive then run any other backup app to get everything to whatever you needed(unless you wanted to do it all with ntbackup).

Sucks that they are not running sbs. It would be so much cheaper for them if they were.

Can't really speak on the online backups. Don't have much experience with them although one of my clients asked me to sit in on a phonecall with one vendor the other day and they wanted 250 bucks a month for the 30 gigs min that we would need to backup offsite. The client laughed at them and said a tape backup would pay for itself in less then 6 months at that rate(really need to push more then that to backup anyway).
 
youch, definately check to make sure the software is legit. If it is, you could use ntbackup to backup to HDD like was already suggested. Then go grab a 50GB iDrive account and backup your server to it. Restoring mailboxes from exchange would still be possible, albeit a lot slower if the server completely crashed.....
 
Captain Colonoscopy said:
youch, definately check to make sure the software is legit. If it is, you could use ntbackup to backup to HDD like was already suggested. Then go grab a 50GB iDrive account and backup your server to it. Restoring mailboxes from exchange would still be possible, albeit a lot slower if the server completely crashed.....
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Yea it is doable. Personaly I would want a better solution but with exchange it gets expensive.

I have a few smaller clients on std with exchange for various reasons but all of them are legit. Have a church thats getting ready to get server 08 with exchange 07 but the software was really marked down as they are non-profit. They have 10 users or so on the network.

Also have a lawfirm with 5 lawyers that is running 2 std 03 boxes with full exchange std. They were running sbs2000 before that. Hell they were really considering enterprise for clustering. We talked them out of it due to price. With both boxes having the same hardware it would be very easy to switch everything to one box fast if needbe. Even they have assistants and whatnot though.

For 4 people man I would have gone with sbs unless they really needed terminal services or something.
 
swatbat said:
For 4 people man I would have gone with sbs unless they really needed terminal services or something.
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For 4 people, I would have gone with gmail IMAP or any other hosted IMAP service. Exchange is overkill plus all the administration...

NTBackup will work. But you will have restore the mailboxes to different folder then copy the contents over for the mailbox you want to restore, thats if I remember correctly. I been using Backupexc for years on Exchange servers with the agent. Cake.
 
xeon711 said:
For 4 people, I would have gone with gmail IMAP or any other hosted IMAP service. Exchange is overkill plus all the administration...

NTBackup will work. But you will have restore the mailboxes to different folder then copy the contents over for the mailbox you want to restore, thats if I remember correctly. I been using Backupexc for years on Exchange servers with the agent. Cake.
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I wouldn't consider exchange overkill for 4 people but it depends on what they are using it for. Maybe go with a hosted exchange solution. If they use the calendar features or any of the other things exchange can do it is fine.

We have a client with 2 people(accountants) running exchange. Why? SBS was cheaper then server std and he enjoys the extra features it has.

Either way that doesn't really help the OP in this case unless he wants to ditch the exchange that is already configured and running. Also depending on how they ended up with exchange we don't know if it was a ripoff or not. It is very possible that they were running windows server std and decided they wanted their email internal for whatever reason(maybe better syncing to smart phones, sharred calendar, contacts, etc).
 
swatbat said:
Maybe go with a hosted exchange solution. If they use the calendar features or any of the other things exchange can do it is fine.
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This is a good point. Plus you get there support. It is indeed hard to get users off Exchange and Outlook.
 
Gotta ask OP if it is all legit what about removing the SQL and selling it if it is legit and putting that to backup exec?
 
marley1 said:
may also be cheaper to buy SBS2003 and install it and reconfigure, then use the built in backup progarm or get Backup Exec SBS
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May have a point here. MSRP for SBS2K3 R2 Standard Edition..which includes 5x cals..is $599.00

Most backup software will start in this range. Plus you get the added benefits of SBSs RWW portal, and local backup with the built in SBS backup utility. SBS is not overkill for this sized network.

Offsite backup is good as a "second" backup, a redundant system, but I'd never use it as the sole backup solution for a business. Come some disaster/restore time..boy you're probably there for days pulling the data back down.

Curious of those Server/Exchange are "Enterprise" editions...in which case getting this client a legit copy of SBS would bring their licensing up to snuff. I'm sure some of you out there have noticed "enterprise" editions of MS Server products before....we know there those wannabe techs get them from. ;)
 
marley1 said:
may also be cheaper to buy SBS2003 and install it and reconfigure, then use the built in backup progarm or get Backup Exec SBS

also its probably not even legit software on that server, ive walked into a few jobs wheres its the same way, pirated server 2003 enterprise, pirated exchange. o well =)
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Yep, maybe cheaper to just rebuild with SBS.

I was telling my partner that same exact thing about the server likely being complete pirate-ware. It does have that "feel" to it. I told her I was hesitant about verifying licenses with Microsoft and stirring up that mess, but that's maybe the best thing to do for several reasons (protecting ourselves being one of them).

The previous IT guy was a total hack, lots of things wrong with the server config that I've mostly fixed now.

This is one of those customers we should have passed up I think.

Thanks for the advice and ideas guys.
 
Spartacus said:
I was telling my partner that same exact thing about the server likely being complete pirate-ware. It does have that "feel" to it. I told her I was hesitant about verifying licenses with Microsoft and stirring up that mess, but that's maybe the best thing to do for several reasons (protecting ourselves being one of them).
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Find the disks. If the server is OEM it should have a sticker on the side of it for the windows install. It it is retail it should have cd case with a number on it somewhere. If they don't have that then it is not legit, simple as that(if they have an open license they should have some paperwork on it).

Past that the cd keys used can be legit but if you don't have proof that they are his then it doesn't matter. You don't even need to call ms on this one if you don't want to.

Personaly I would have no problem calling ms and asking them what type of keys were used(oem, retail, vlk) and if they could tell if they came from an action pack or msdn. I've done this before trying to verify pirate software. Last time I verified one I thanked them when they said it was not and said I was overnighting a new copy of sbs to get it fixed. That was the end of that.
 
Yeouch. Sucks for your client man. Same as anyone else here has said, check the legitimacy of the software. Then you might just get a cheap eSATA drive cage that can support a removable tray with a few extra disks/trays, run ntbackup on a schedule on the whole machine and swap out at prudent intervals. Obviously this isn't a good system-wide backup policy, but if all you care about is the Exchange server, it ought to work.
 
I cannot backup several hundred gigs of data over a WAN connection. Online backups are out.
 
Use NTbackup with external USB/esata drives. Run it from your Exchange box
 
NT backup.. if you need single exchange mailbox restores, look into ontrack software... i think for 3-4 people you can get it pretty darn cheap, and it'll let you pull a single mailbox from ntbackup and restore to exchange server.


p.s. We use backupexec 9xx something rather, and it constantly pops out errors from exchange, i'm really not a big backupexec fan(granted our version is wicked old, but it's crap)
 
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