Computer Associates ARCserve Backup 12.5 review

Naturally, the longer data is retained, the better the storage savings will get. ARCserve provides deduplication policies for backup jobs that aren't part of a staging process where you can decide on the number of days, weeks or months data should be retained before being purged.

Backing up VMware VMs requires the VCB utility to be installed on a Windows Server 2003 system acting as the proxy along with the ARCserve Windows and VMware agents. With these in place we ran ARCserve's configuration tool to declare where our backup server and ESX Server systems were. On completion, the main ARCserve backup source window was automatically updated with our Server 2008 VMs presented ready for backup and restore operations.

The Dashboard offers a wealth of information and during testing it provided us with reports and graphs on deduplication efficiency and projected storage savings. It covers a wide range of other areas including status reports on all backup jobs, client nodes and encryption plus reports on backup data distribution, volume usage, media assurance operations, backup servers and much, much more.

The deduplication feature currently makes ARCserve unique as no other Windows backup software on the market offers backup, restore and data deduplication functions as a single, integrated solution and at no extra cost. There are plenty of other equally valuable new features on the table making ARCserve one of the best value backup products on the market.

Author: Dave Mitchell