Arctera Backup Exec 25.1 review: A smart business data protection solution with no hidden costs

Data protection and management software provider Arctera has had a busy year. Cohesity's acquisition of Veritas saw it spun out as an independent company at the start of 2025. Subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions, it will now join Cloud Security Group (CSG) and operate as a separate business unit within a portfolio that includes Citrix and Tibco.

Backup Exec (BE) is Arctera's flagship data protection solution. And after unshackling itself from Veritas, the company assigned it a dedicated software development team – something it hadn't previously had. They haven't wasted any time, as the latest BE 25.1 on review delivers a wealth of updates.

It supports Windows Server 2025 and offers improved Microsoft 365 protection. Along with facilities to secure Teams private channels and restore Exchange items to PST files, it now provides Microsoft Entra ID tenant data backup and restore services.

MS365 full consolidation backup performance has been enhanced, and SharePoint Subscription Edition is supported for backup and GRT (granular recovery technology) item restores. A restore administrator role has been added, and the integral malware detection scanner now supports the Symantec Protection Engine (SPE) along with Windows Defender.

Arctera Backup Exec 25.1 review: Easy deployment and backup

We installed BE 25.1 on a HPE ProLiant Windows Server 2022 host and were ready for some backup action in 20 minutes. The informative widget-based console dashboard can be customised to suit, and BE now automatically creates a self-protect media server backup job which secures essential data such as catalogue files, the BE database, encryption keys, and job logs.

MS365 protection is quick to configure as you use the console's backup and restore panel to add a new tenant, click on the link provided, and enter the unique device code it generates. During backup job, creation you can choose from any or all MS365 services with the selection window in BE 25.1 offering an extra tab for Entra ID components.

Virtualization host protection is equally simple to create, as we used the console to deploy an agent to our Hyper-V systems to enable agentless VM backup. Agents aren't required for VMware VM protection, as we declared our vCenter hosts to BE by providing their IP addresses and credentials.

For VM backups, you have a forever incremental strategy that automatically starts with one full backup followed by partial backups, multi-stream backups within a VM are supported, and it can secure virtual disks in parallel. If you have VMs hosting business apps, you may want to deploy an agent inside them, as this enables features such as GRT for item-level restoration.

Backup job creation is swift; after selecting sources, you assign a job from a list of predefined ones, add multiple stages for duplicating backups to off-site storage, set a schedule, and enable backup set encryption for extra ransomware protection. Backup destinations can be local disks, network shares, deduplicating stores (which you'll need for MS365 backup jobs), tape drives, and a wide range of cloud providers, with BE 25.1 now supporting immutable OVHcloud WORM storage as well as Azure, Amazon S3, and Google.

Arctera Backup Exec 25.1 review: Data recovery

Restore features are excellent as you select a source, pick a recovery point, browse its files, folders or volumes and decide where to send items. GRT can be used to restore items such as SQL databases, you can recover individual Hyper-V and VMware virtual disks and create a simplified recovery disk for bare metal recovery of physical servers.

If time is of the essence, you can use the Instant VM Recovery feature to quickly create a new VM from an existing backup. Choose a VM from the source list, select this option, pick a backup set and decide which virtualisation host to send it to. It's fast as it only took us one minute to restore a SQL Server VM to a new VMware host.

We created a protection job for our entire MS365 account and found the recovery processes easy to use as a restore wizard guided us through choosing a component and selecting a point in time or backup set. For Exchange Online, we could choose individual emails and restore them to the original user or another mailbox while the new Entra ID protection service offered options for recovering any entity including our users, groups and enterprise apps.

Arctera Backup Exec 25.1 review: Ransomware protection

BE provides valuable ransomware protection services as it offers AES-256 backup encryption and support for backup devices such as LTO tape drives that use T10 hardware encryption. Access to the media server can be locked down by enabling RBAC (role-based access controls) and assigning one of five roles to permitted users.

Anomaly detection is enabled by default and comes into play after 30 backups have run. It compares criteria such as backup image sizes, item counts, job times plus the amount of transferred data and posts alerts in a dedicated console widget for review.

For malware scanning, you choose either the Defender or SPE engines from the main BE settings page and run them manually on selected backup sets or include them in VMware and Hyper-V VM restore jobs. We tested Defender on a Hyper-V VM backup that had malware preloaded which it identified and created an alert.

We did find it can be quite demanding for media server CPU resources but you can reduce its impact by modifying the default settings to allow Defender to apply throttling and use fewer threads. Scan times may also be an issue if you want to check a business-critical VM before restoring it as our tests took between 30-40 minutes to complete.

Arctera Backup Exec 25.1 review: Is it worth it?

Arctera's BE Simple Core Pack subscriptions are easy to understand and available in instance or capacity metering options with both enabling every Backup Exec feature and option. Instance metering will appeal to smaller businesses as it's based on compute instances which can be a physical system, a virtual machine or ten Microsoft 365 (MS365) users with the base price including an extra bonus instance for ten MS365 users.

Value looks good with Senetic UK listing a base one year 5-instance licence for £625 excluding VAT rising to around £2,600 for five years. You can upgrade at any time using Simple Add-On packs with a one year single instance pack costing £125.

SMBs seeking a reliable on-premises data protection and recovery solution for physical and virtualised server environments will find Arctera's Backup Exec 25.1 a top candidate. It can easily manage a hybrid backup strategy, includes full MS365 protection services, offers good ransomware protection and its flexible licensing schemes neatly avoid any hidden costs.