Backup Everything Business review

The Backup Everything Business (BEB) cloud service certainly lives up to its name; there doesn't seem to be any system or app it can't protect. Windows, Linux, Mac, VMware, Hyper-V, Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint -- you name it and this product can back it up.

SMEs will like the price which starts at 10 per month for 100GB of cloud storage - and that's compressed capacity with no client limits. Extra cloud storage costs 10p/month/GB, a vault seeding service is free and both data centres are in the UK so nothing leaves these shores.

There are no push services, so the BEB client has to be downloaded to each system to be protected. Even so, it only took two minutes for each one and then we could get on with creating our backup sets.

The BEB client interface is a cheery affair with chunky icons for the six main functions. During backup set creation, you pick the type of backup you want and it's here you'll see just how versatile BEB is.

Options are provided for files, system states, virtualized environments, Exchange datastore and message level backups (MLBs), SQL databases -- even IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. When we chose an app such as Exchange, the BEB client checked the host and displayed the version it had discovered ready for selection.

We browsed and selected individual Hyper-V VMs, picked databases on our SQL Server 2014 system and opted for complete host and MLB backups on our Exchange servers. For the latter, we viewed all mailboxes and could select the entire mailstore, specific users and individual items.

Next, we chose an existing backup schedule or created a new one and then selected the backup destination. BEB is a versatile hybrid solution as each backup set supports multiple destinations including its UK cloud storage plus local, mapped and removable storage devices.

A smart feature we've not seen elsewhere is the cloud file backup option. You can secure data in your Dropbox, Amazon, Google, Azure, OneDrive, OpenStack, RackSpace and FTP cloud repositories direct to the BEB cloud vault or to local and networked storage.

Synology NAS owners get in on the backup act as well. With the BEB DSM package installed on the lab's RS3618xs appliance, it presented exactly the same client interface allowing us to secure selected share data to the cloud.

Data in flight and at rest is safe as during backup set creation, you can use your account password as the encryption key, provide a unique key yourself or let the client generate one for you. BEB stores the key in the cloud and will email it only to the account administrator if it's lost.

Restore operations are a cinch - choose this option from the BEB interface, pick a backup set and decide what you want to recover. For files and folders, you can choose backup sets from other systems and remotely restore them to their original location or another destination.

The same applied to our SQL databases and Exchange datastore backups while MLB item-level recovery is run at the Exchange host. For Hyper-V VM backups, the 'Run Direct' option secures them to local or networked storage without compression or encryption so they can be recovered swiftly into the production environment. Granular VM restores are also available for this backup type where the VM's drives are mounted as local volumes on the Hyper-V host for drag and drop data recovery.

Backup Everything Business offers a superb range of hybrid backup features teamed up with extensive platform support. It's simple to use, provides slick recovery tools and is priced right for SMEs.

Verdict

Rival services offer cloud storage for less, but Backup Everything gives small businesses a hybrid backup solution that’s simple to use.

Windows 7/Server 2008 upwards

Mac OS X 10.7.3 upwards

Linux