Veritas Backup Exec is a data protection software product that supports virtual, physical and cloud platforms. Sold by Veritas Technologies LLC, Backup Exec is compatible with most storage devices, including disk, tape and cloud.

The product was previously known as Symantec Backup Exec when Veritas was part of security giant Symantec Corp. Veritas was sold by Symantec in January 2016 to The Carlyle Group private equity firm for $7.4 billion.

Veritas Backup Exec features:

Veritas claims more than 2 million Backup Exec customers, mainly in the SMB and midmarket arena.

Key Veritas Backup Exec features include:

• fast virtual machine (VM) snapshots through integration with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (Microsoft VSS);
• instant recovery of VMware and Hyper-V VMs;
• integrated global deduplication and changed block tracking;
• integrated bare-metal, physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical recovery;
• the ability to protect thousands of VMs from a single user console.

Backup Exec 15 features support for VMware ESXi 6 and vCenter 6, VMware Virtual SAN 6 and Virtual Volumes. Backup Exec 15 also offered enhanced VM capabilities with support for SAN restores and VMs with volumes of more than 2 terabytes.

Veritas Backup Exec 16, which became generally available in November 2016, expanded its support to include the Microsoft Azure cloud, Windows Server 2016 and Hyper-V Server 2016. Previous product versions already supported Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Google Cloud Platform, as well as third-party clouds that support the Amazon Simple Storage Service protocol.

Other new features of Backup Exec 16 include:

• Veritas branding;
• a simplified licensing and purchasing model built for midsize companies that do not have complicated infrastructures or dedicated backup administrators;
• expanded cloud support that streamlines migration to the cloud by offering a single platform to protect critical data across cloud, virtual and physical infrastructures;
• a new default database instance that installs SQL Server 2014 Express Service Pack 2.