Backup Software For Small Organizations

August 27th, 2009 by Zac

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I produced the following chart to accompany TechSoup’s Backup webinar today.

Here is the Word document, it’s a little nicer for printing.

I haven’t evaluated or even used all of these packages. Mostly we use Symantec Backup Exec and EMC Insignia’s Retrospect. I’d be interested to try the backup options from Acronis and/or Paragon, because they started out as disk imaging utilities and have evolved into tools that can be used for backup. The nice thing about that is they have the potential to restore a complete system, with operating system and installed software intact.

Desktop Backup Software For Small Organizations

Package	Platform	Recovers System	Encrypts Backup	Online Backup	Antivirus/ Security	Price (USD)
Acronis Backup and Recovery Workstation	Win	Yes	No	No	No	$90
Apple Mac OS X 10.5+ (Time Machine)	Mac	No	No	No	No	$30 – $100
EMC Insignia Retrospect	Win/Mac	Yes	Yes	No	No	$40 – $170
Microsoft Windows Backup (ntbackup)	Win	No	No	No	No	N/A
Norton 360	Win	No	No	Yes	Yes	$15 – $80
Norton Ghost	Win	Yes	No	No	No	$70
Norton Save And Restore	Win	Yes	Yes	No	No	$15 – 50
Paragon Drive Backup	Win	Yes	No	No	No	$0 – $40
Prosoft Data Backup 3	Mac	Yes	Yes	No	No	$40 – $60

Server/Network Backup Software For Small Organizations

Package	Platform	Recovers System	Backs up Server(s)	Backs up Desktops⁴	Price (USD)
Acronis Backup and Recovery Server	Win	Yes	Yes	No	$600 - $1700
Apple Mac OS X 10.5+ (Time Machine)	Mac	No	N/A	Yes¹	$29 - $100
Apple Mac OS X Server (Time Machine)	Mac	Yes	Yes	Yes	$300 - $500
BackupAssist	Win	No	Yes	No	$249
EMC Insignia Retrospect	Win/Mac	Yes²	Yes	Yes³	$40 - $1700
Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager	Win	No	Yes	No	$16 - $1000
Microsoft Windows Server	Win	No	Yes³	No	$40 - $900
Paragon Drive Backup Server	Win	Yes	Yes	No	$300 - $1000
Symantec Backup Exec	Win	Yes	Yes⁴	Yes³	$117 - $1000
Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Server	Win	Yes	Yes	Yes	$425 - $3600+

¹With addition of Apple Time Capsule hardware, $300.

²With optional Bare Metal Restore add-on, $709.

³Purchase of additional licenses for client desktops may be required.

⁴Desktop data can be protected by redirecting folders to a server.

One Response

John Mutrux writes:

September 8th, 2009 at 9:40 am

Time Machine recently informed me that it had “erased old backups to make room for newer backups.” !!!!! #$%&@!!#E$%!!! Say it isn’t true. Suddenly my oldest backup on my system is early May. WTF?….

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