Hi, Dan, thanks for publishing the forum on this topic!

To join Ilya’s vendor commentary on this forum, I’d like to provide some notes about AvePoint’s product – DocAve.  Very often our products get compared and we all pride ourselves on providing granular, full-fidelity item-level restore capabilities.

The major difference between Quest backup solution and AvePoint’s DocAve is that Quest provides recovery from SQL backups, DocAve however allows you to run its own granular backup jobs. There are benefits to both.  SQL admins do run SQL backups and it is useful to utilize existing backup jobs, but for many organizations, however, it may not address SLA’s Recovery Point Objectives (data loss) and storage issues as well as desired.

DocAve is unique in allowing a granular backup capability in addition to a granular restore.

For example, if you have a department that can only tolerate 1 hour data loss for their site and important documents, then with SQL backup you will need to back up your entire database every hour. This can clearly cause serious storage and performance issues.  With DocAve you can build and schedule backup plans based on your specific requirements.  It allows you to backup critical areas of your SharePoint environment more frequently, and also allow you to optimally leverage existing tiered storage capabilities within your organization, as each plan can be backed up to different media devices.

We have posted a white paper that describes business importance of granular backup, which you can find here:  http://www.avepoint.com/assets/sharepoint_whitepapers/Can-SharePoint-backup-harm-your-business.pdf .

Also, want to let the reader know about the recovery functionality that is only available in DocAve (and completely integrated with the backup above, but can be purchased separately) is our Platform Recovery module – it provides up-to-the minute platform recovery in case of a disaster. It enables SharePoint Administrators to backup and recover the ENTIRE SharePoint platform, including web applications, content databases, search and index servers, and front-end server/file systems. It backs up SQL logs during the normal backup process and restores using log files for point-in-time content recovery.

Other SharePoint backup options (both AvePoint OEM deals):

-          If you are using IBM Tivoli – IBM TSM for SharePoint completely integrates DocAve for document recovery.

-          If you are using NetApp – NetApp SnapManager for SharePoint (SMMOSS) provides snapshot of the environment and still allows for granular item restore (also OEM’ed DocAve for this solution).

To try out the functionality (that also applies to IBM TSM and NetApp backup solutions for SharePoint) all three, you can simply download a free trial – fully functional for ALL DocAve modules for 30 days:  http://www.avepoint.com/download/

Since mentioned in one of the forums, here are a few facts about AvePoint: AvePoint is completely dedicated to SharePoint; has been around since 2001; has over 2000 customers, many of them are Fortune 500; and has OEM agreements with IBM and NetApp.  Our backup solutions mentioned above are modules of our integrated platform of complete SharePoint back-end management and administration products, which also include archiving, replication, administration, migration, and compliance solutions. All these fully integrated software solutions are part of the DocAve platform and interface, and can be purchased both as a suite and independently.

Thank you,
Inna