SharePoint User Group UK

Has anyone got a backup solution for MOSS 2007 working OK. We have been looking at Quest Recovery Manager and Avepoint DocAve and wondered if anyone had any working knowledge/experiences, good or bad, of them? Any other solutions would be gratefully received as well.

Bruce Mclean
University of Hertfordshire

Haven't yet used AvePoint for MOSS, tried to use it against SPS2003 and experience performance issues with Portals and site collections over ~3GB in size... They have (hopefully) sorted this out...

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Matt Groves
Strategic Consultant - Trinity Expert Systems Ltd [www.tesl.com]
Blog: www.sharepointblogs.com/mattg/

For our 2003 solution we used a product called Quinetix Galaxy Commvault. Will restore to document level. It also works for 2007, but only the 32 bit version and not 64bit. The 64bit release is due in July, when I'll reconfigure our backups from Livestate to use Galaxy.

Very good system, and needed little or no input from an admin once setup and working. Tested restores of whole sites and individual docs with no problems.

Mike

I also have used Commvault, however, it didn't get beyond POC due to performance issues.

The customer was using SPS2003 and had around 4000 site collections hanging off the Portal with approx 200GB of data, it was taking CommVault several hours to enumerate the sites and content before starting the backup, it then took several hours to do the backup. These 2 figures combined took longer than the available backup window.

There were several features going into the next version that would address these issues (this was back in winter 2005) but it wouldn't meet the customers timescales and so was abandoned. These have almost certainly been rolled into the current version...

As a company they were quite good to deal with, their support (based in germany) was good and the account manager (Massimo Merlo - IIRC) was excellent (streets ahead of AvePoint in my experience), that said, at the time their technology just didn't cut it!

Mike - maybe you can enlighten us - have the throughput/performance issues been addressed? At the time they were talking about vNext having multiple streams for both enumeration and writing the backups, and having wildcard based rules to group together the site collections into backup sets. This would solve the performance issue my client was having I my opinion - are these now features of the product?

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Matt Groves
Strategic Consultant - Trinity Expert Systems Ltd [www.tesl.com]
Blog: www.sharepointblogs.com/mattg/

Thanks for the input, it is very illuminating and I will have a look at ComVault 

Our experience with AvePoint is at very early  testing stage.  On the face of it it is very easy to use and very quick in the speed of backups and restores and it is extremely user friendly to the point we are considering devolving some elements down to user level. Granularity goes right down to idividual documents, lists, list items etc as well as options for site or subsite backup/restore

Trouble is we are getting patchy results with restores. Support is energetic but very patchy in effectiveness. I get the feeling of a company which is stretching itself at present. Recovery Manager we are giving a miss as we have Backup Express and it seems very similar.

Our experience with size only goes up to about 1Gb which does not cause a problem

Hi, I think it will be worth reporting back to this forum when we upgrade to ver7, which I believe will cover most of the issues raised.

Our experience of ver 5.9 backing up our AD, Exchange cluster and sharepoint 2003 has been on the whole very good. We spent a couple of days getting all the pre-requisits completed before doing the install, and the engineer who came over from Holland said our site had been the best install due to the time we had spent getting everything in place before his arrival.

I do like the product, and hope the newer version will be as good as the what we have used to this point.

Mike

Hi Bruce,

DocAve is a very good comprehensive backup/restore product. It provides full granular backup and restore and fully supports all MOSS features.

You should also consider EMC Backup Manager for SharePoint. This is a fairly new product, I got a long way down the road of evaluating it with my last client, and it looked really great. Sadly my contract ended before I was able to put it into the production environment.

Galaxy... hmm.... it's funny, my experience is diametrically opposite to MattGroves! The product seemed to be pretty good, but CommVault were the worst supplier I have ever had the misfortune to work with. I won't got into detail, but suffice to say I have sworn never to put any business their way again. Ever.

With regard to Quest, you need to be clear that it is NOT a backup tool. It is purely a recovery tool which allows you to interrogate a SQL backup file. That backup file has to be generated elsewhere (we use Litespeed). It's also important to note that Quest cannot currently restore workflows or workflow links, and cannot perform a farm level backup at all. So it's far from a comprehensive solution, but if you're looking for purely site-level and item-level restore capability, then it's worth evaluating.

Cheers

Poolio

That is strange. The client I was working with at the time is a major league VC/MBO financer who also had requirements to look at Exchange, AD and SQL backup strategy as well as SPS - maybe commvault were interested in winning more business from them - either way it is strange to have such difference in perception!

I found the initial sales guy a bit smarmy (I generally have a low opinion of salesmen anyway!) but Massimo was on the ball...

 

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Matt Groves
Strategic Consultant - Trinity Expert Systems Ltd [www.tesl.com]
Blog: www.sharepointblogs.com/mattg/

Greetings,

I have been reading posts from this forum for some time now. I am impressed with the quality of the threads and the politeness of the community. (some other sites get a bit testy for unknown reasons)

Regarding MOSS 2007 backup has anyone ever use the Acronis True Image Enterprise Backup server product?

I used the Acronis True Image "Home" version and it saved me from having to rebuild a XP laptop. It was flawless.

I guess I will need to test their on my MOSS server.  Should I post my findings?

Regards,
ken wood
camarillo, ca
the states

I would be interested to hear what an upcoming company like Acronis said about a DR solution for Sharepoint. they have very good software in my opinion.

However on to the question regarding Avepoint , Commvault , NSE , etc etc. I think they all have something to offer and I have spoken to dozens of different companies who seem to have totally different experiences with all companies. It seems to depend who you end up speaking to and deal with from each one. From an historical point of view commvault has been with SharePoint since 2001 , no other company can claim that but AvePoint has been turning up the marketing heat with 2007 making it an interesting competition. I personally think this is very healthy as hopefully we the users should be the winners. You have to do your homework though and consider cost per server and backup / restore times , support and administration overhead. I have one experience to share when a company I knew tested commvault by taking his disks out and said now prove your DR solution. they restored the whole sharepoint farm in hours , which was very impressive but he was dealing with a Commvault distributer for this Zycko www.zycko.com .

The bottom line though is that if you need a DR solution for sites , list, libraries and documents then you have to buy a third party solution and seeing as your most required DR need will be these things then I am afraid you have to bite the bullet with one of them , pick the one you feel happy working with. But ask for a demo and test it against you infastructure before buying.

Steve Smith

It would be interesting if the SP community could manage to develop a checklist matrix that mapped all of the pluses/minuses and feature sets of all of the current mainstream offerings.

I guess that I would list the restore features at the top because that is really where the rubber meets the road.

To me, the entrire backup/restore technology is becoming even more important. It's almost a black art.

For interest, why are you guys using 3rd party tools, rather than native backup utils?

The native tools aren't too hot, reasonable for DR, but poor for content restores (although this has been somewhat alleiviated by the recycle bin).

It is also often the case that SharePoint backup needs to fall in line with backup methodolgies and standards within an organisation.

In a nut-shell, OOTB is basic, the third parties are more flexible and powerful.

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Matt Groves
Strategic Consultant - Trinity Expert Systems Ltd [www.tesl.com]
Blog: www.sharepointblogs.com/mattg/

I certainly would appreciate some kind of matrix for all of the different options available... It is very difficult to choose between the different 3rd party options out there. I am swayed by Quest's option, because it will work with the Litespeed backup already in place. This means that I won't need to do any restores of the database in order to interrogate the information. Recovery Manager can access the information directly from the compressed backup file.

Is there truly anything out there that does everything??

I am new to MOSS, so excuse the 'newbie' questions, but just how important is it to be able to perform a workflow or workflow link restore? What is a farm level backup?

I thought I would just update the forum on our progress.  Thanks for all of your contributions. We finally settled on AvePoint DocAve for a backup and retore solution. There are other add ons such as Content Management, Archiving, Disaster Recovery etc as add on modules which made it very easy to tailor to our solution. Other folks will need other facilities and they can be added as and when desired and the budget allows.

We did have some problems in the setup but I think in hindsight many of those issue were related to our mistakes rather than the product having a problem. It did however allow us at first hand to see what the support was like. I have to say that there is only one word which describes their attitude to getting it right and that is "passionate"

They utilised a product called WebEx which is a kind of web based conferencing facility combined with remote control (managed by the customer) so that they, watched by me, could look at how the server was configured etc. and resolve the installation problems within an hour whilst talking me through it by phone. Since they are in the US and they called me, I was impressed.

A recent email request for advice was responded to with a solution within 24 hours, which bearing in mind the time difference, I think is good.  This is representative of all the contact I have had with them.

As regards cost, well we are a University and as Steve Smith (Combined Knowledge) said, quite rightly, in a recent seminar "the education guys think a couple of hundred pounds is a lot". Yes we do, because IT budgets are very tight in Education. That said we thought AvePoint was good value for money and we bought it and the support.

In conclusion I am well pleased with an easy to use, web based, scalable and supported solution which does what we want it to do at a price we can afford.

If anybody wants any more detail, happy to oblige

Bruce Mclean
University of Hertfordshire