Quite a few years ago, I was invited to speak at the SMB IT Pro Experts conference. As I walked up to the podium, organizer Jeff Middleton introduced me to the room as “Linus from Backup Exec.”
He caught himself immediately. “BackupAssist! I meant BackupAssist!”
The room erupted in laughter. I laughed too. After a decade of being the smaller, scrappier alternative, I was used to it.
But here’s the thing: I genuinely didn’t mind. Backup Exec was the giant. We were the underdog. Getting confused with them was almost flattering – like a garage band being mistaken for the Rolling Stones.
Well, times change.
Last week, Arctera (the company that now owns Backup Exec after it passed through Seagate Software and Veritas and Symantec and Veritas) announced that Backup Exec is being discontinued. End of sale: March 31, 2026. End of life: April 30, 2029. After decades as the industry incumbent for Windows backup, the giant is heading into the sunset.
And somehow, our not-so-little backup tool from Melbourne is still here.
The $1,600 Question
BackupAssist exists because of Backup Exec. I mean that literally.
Back in 2002, a local system administrator here in Melbourne approached me with a problem. He was struggling to get ntbackup (Windows’ built-in backup utility) to do what he needed. He’d heard I was handy with code and asked if I could help.
His exact words: “I just paid $1,600 for a tape drive. I don’t want to pay $1,600 for Backup Exec.”
That number stuck with me. $1,600 was a lot of money for a small business just trying to protect their data. It still is. So I started tinkering with ntbackup, trying to make it actually usable. Argh – I ran into that mega confusing Removable Storage Manager! Honestly, it was a buggy piece of software that took me 3 months to reverse engineer and understand… I have since repressed those memories, but the good news is that tinkering became BackupAssist.
Twenty-four years later—our anniversary is this August—we’ve built an entire company on the principle that backup software shouldn’t require a second mortgage or a computer science degree.
The Ultimate Irony: Junior Beats Senior
To this day, I still can’t get over this one. The ultimate irony is that “ntbackup” itself was a cut-down version of Backup Exec that Microsoft licensed from Seagate Software, and then Veritas (at the time). We all saw what the plan was – Microsoft licensed “ntbackup” from Veritas so it could claim it had a backup solution, but then made it unusable, so then the frustrated sysadmin would be forced to buy the full version from Veritas! Of course, Veritas wouldn’t want to cannibalize their own market, and this seemed like a perfect arrangement.
They just never anticipated that anyone would spend the time figuring out how to get it to work. And then build a simple UI on top of it. And then add back the missing features like scheduling, reporting…
So effectively, the junior version of Backup Exec plus the usability fixes in BackupAssist ended up outcompeting the senior version of Backup Exec for thousands and thousands of people.
The Rivalry We Never Named
In the early days, we ran print advertisements comparing our product to the competition. You know the one. We never mentioned Backup Exec by name, of course. That would have been legally inadvisable.
But we did use certain… colors. A particular shade of yellow. A familiar visual style.
If you were in the industry, you knew exactly who we were talking about. It was our little inside joke with the entire Windows admin community.
Looking at it now, I’m genuinely proud of how cheeky we were. We were a tiny company from Australia taking swings at a Symantec product with a marketing budget roughly a million times larger than ours. The audacity was part of the fun.
My Confession
Here’s something I’ve never publicly admitted before.
In those early years, I tried to do a proper feature comparison between BackupAssist and Backup Exec. Competitive analysis. Know your enemy. Standard business practice.
So I downloaded and installed Backup Exec, rolled up my sleeves, and attempted to set up my first backup job.
I couldn’t do it.
I swear I tried for a solid hour. The interface was overwhelming. The options were endless. Jargon was everywhere. I just couldn’t figure it out – it required a different way of thinking. I felt like I was trying to pilot a space shuttle when all I wanted to do was copy some files to a tape drive.
Then I found the user manual.
800 pages.
Nope… I’m too lazy, ah I mean busy, for that! I gave up. I never completed the competitive analysis. To this day, I have no idea how Backup Exec’s feature set truly compared to ours because I couldn’t get far enough into the product to find out.
That experience crystallized everything for me. I didn’t just want BackupAssist to be cheaper than the alternative. I wanted it to be understandable. If a backup job takes more than a few minutes to configure, something has gone wrong. If your manual is longer than a novel, you’ve lost the plot.
No Victory Laps
I want to be clear: this isn’t a victory lap. Backup Exec helped a lot of businesses protect their data over the years. It was a serious product built by serious engineers, and plenty of administrators swore by it. The people who built it, sold it, and used it all had good intentions.
But I’d be lying if I said there isn’t something poetic about the timing.
Backup Exec reaches end of sale in March 2026. BackupAssist celebrates 24 years in August 2026.
The giant is retiring. The underdog is still in the ring.
What Happens Now?
If you’re currently using Backup Exec and you’re wondering what comes next, I have some obvious advice: give us a look. We’ve spent 24 years building backup software that’s powerful enough for serious data protection but simple enough that you won’t need an 800-page manual to figure it out.
And you’ll be amazed at the advanced cyber-resilience features we’ve built into BackupAssist – like CryptoSafeGuard to protect backups from sabotage and ransomware, and the Cyber Black Box to capture historical forensic data and put them into the backups.
We’re still based in Melbourne, although we’ve expanded to the USA, Malaysia and Germany. We still answer the phone when you call. And we still cost considerably less than $1,600.
Some things don’t change.
Thanks for everything, Backup Exec. It was a good rivalry – one that pushed the I.T. industry forward towards enhanced cyber-resilience.
Linus Chang is the founder of BackupAssist. He has never successfully completed a backup job in Backup Exec.
