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What is the best backup solution available in the market for SharePoint?
I am thinking of AvePoint's backup solution vs Idera's backup solution. Do you recommend anything? Are there any pro's and con's?
What should be considered in choosing a good backup solution?
This is just for disaster recovery. There is no pre production environment. I need to fully/quickly restore the farm if anything goes wrong.
If you look at the various packages you should see some similar capabilities, but they perform the work in different ways.
As an example, Quest's tools basically mounts the SQL Server backups. If you are already doing SQL backups then that might be an advantage, but if you are using a different backup solution it would be redundant with some other negatives. AvePoint recently offered a similar solution, but their main suite works completely differently. I'm also familiar with ComVault, but like a few vendors they essentially have a backup platform with a connector for SharePoint. In that case you wouldn't implement it just for SharePoint. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with Idera.
One place to look for reviews is: http://www.sharepointreviews.com
My personal preference, and this doesn't reflect on any of the other vendors, is AvePoint. I used it for a few years in multiple environments including a complicated implementation where other tools failed.
Someone much smarter than me told me something interesting at last year's SharePoint Conference...it was his opinion that the AvePoint tool interacts w/ SharePoint's databases in a completely unsupported manner. I haven't had a chance to verify this myself, but I would recommend talking to AvePoint and getting an idea of exactly how it functions.
I'm not trying to rumor-monger here or anything, just saying that you may want to do some due-diligence and check it out (something you should do w/ whatever platform you chose). I haven't talked to anyone who was unhappy with the AvePoint product, and if it had major problems they wouldn't have been selling it so well in the market for as long as they have.
The big thing is to take Mike's advice to heart and take a close look at the various feature sets of each product. Most of them offer free trial versions of them, the best thing you can do is test them each out and find the best fit for your environment, requirements, and administrators. Take a look at how effective they are, how well they manage your storage, what kind of resources they require (DPM requires a recovery farm, which is more overhead), how usable they are, and make sure they function well enough to meet your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
I think it also depends on the budget you have for the solution.
A simple approach can be to have a scheduled task to run every specific period and perform an STSADM -O Backup on the site collection(s) and have this backup file stores somewhere.
Another approach would be to schedule SQL server dastabase backups for the content databases.
Also of importance to note that you need to periodically test your backups to make sure they are indeed working (check : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/14.html )
My experience of AvePoint has been pretty decent too. (Despite the sligltly odd UI and the use of Java and Tomcat.)
For a Microsoft shop, I'd've thought DPM would be a front runner.