I want to thank Sharee for hosting last nights SharePoint User Group meeting.  The topic of backups is a very important area that is still largely undefined.  It was great to see the three products.

 

I would like to pose some questions to the larger group that I also asked last night. 

 

What solution/product are you using to backup your SharePoint environment?

 

How has it performed?

 

Personally I have used the built in tool but it's limited specifically in the areas of granular recovery, scheduling, retention/cleanup, and integration with enterprise backups.

 

I have also used EMC Networker product called Backup Manager for SharePoint.  It's actually separate from Networker so there's no integration.  They touted both a granular and a farm/sitecollection level backup.  At time of purchase (Sept 08) they had a bug that failed the granular backup.  It took two months (and lots of our engineer time) for them to admit to the bug. They found it related to the last major Sharepoint Update that was about a year old.  That told us they either had no customers using this or none of their customers have updated their SharePoint with that service update.  They fixed it and it started running.  It was painful using their support and the product left a lot to be desired.  It was also costly.  I don't recommend it.

 

So how about you all?