Buyer's guide · On-premise, cloud and hybrid
Choosing server backup software comes down to three questions before any vendor comparison: what are you protecting (Windows Server, Hyper-V, VMware, physical machines or SaaS), where does the copy live (on-premise, cloud or both), and how quickly do you need to be running again. That last one is the one businesses answer too casually — a backup that restores in four days is a very different product from one that restores in four hours, and the price difference reflects it. One thing worth stating before the list: whatever you choose, it must offer immutable backups. Ransomware now routinely encrypts backup repositories before triggering, and a backup your servers can delete is a backup an attacker can delete. Costs below are the INR figures we quote in India, excluding 18% GST.
The default for virtualised environments — Hyper-V and VMware
Veeam is the most widely deployed backup platform for virtualised infrastructure and remains the strongest answer if your servers run on Hyper-V or VMware. Image-level backups, instant VM recovery that boots a machine directly from backup storage while a full restore runs in the background, and genuinely reliable application-aware processing for SQL Server, Exchange and Active Directory. Immutable backup repositories are supported and should be configured from day one. The interface rewards someone who understands virtualisation; it is not a set-and-forget product for a business without IT support.
Pros
Cons
Best for: Any Indian business running Hyper-V or VMware with more than a handful of virtual machines, especially where fast recovery matters.
Backup and endpoint security in one agent — strongest for mixed estates
Acronis merges backup with anti-malware and patch management in a single agent, which is a genuine operational advantage for smaller Indian businesses running one mixed environment of physical servers, a few VMs and staff laptops. Bare-metal recovery to dissimilar hardware works well, which matters when the failed server is three years old and cannot be replaced like for like. The consolidated approach means one console and one vendor instead of separate backup and security products, though specialists beat it on individual capabilities.
Pros
Cons
Best for: SMEs with mixed physical, virtual and laptop estates who want one product and one vendor rather than assembling a stack.
Fully cloud-native — nothing to run, from ₹2,400/endpoint/year
Druva takes the opposite approach to everything else here: there is no backup server, no repository to size and no infrastructure to maintain, because the entire platform is delivered as SaaS. For businesses without dedicated IT that is a substantial advantage — the most common backup failure in Indian SMEs is not bad software but an unmonitored backup server that silently stopped working eight months ago. Pricing is transparent at ₹2,400 per endpoint per year and ₹2,800 per user per year for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace protection, which addresses the widespread and mistaken belief that SaaS data does not need backing up.
Pros
Cons
Best for: Businesses without dedicated IT, distributed teams, and anyone who needs Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace backed up properly.
Enterprise breadth — the right answer at scale, oversized below it
Commvault covers more workloads, databases and edge cases than anything else on this page, with the policy depth, granular retention control and reporting that large regulated organisations need for audit. That breadth is exactly why it is the wrong choice for a thirty-person company: the licensing, the deployment and the administrative overhead all assume a team whose job is data protection. Where an Indian enterprise has heterogeneous infrastructure and real compliance reporting obligations, it earns its place.
Pros
Cons
Best for: Large Indian enterprises and regulated institutions with heterogeneous infrastructure and formal audit requirements.
Free and built in — and not a backup strategy
Windows Server Backup ships with the operating system and costs nothing, which makes it tempting for a business with one server. It handles a scheduled full or incremental backup to attached or network storage and can perform bare-metal recovery. What it does not do is what matters: no immutability, no meaningful central management across servers, limited retention control, and no protection whatsoever if ransomware reaches the destination volume — which, being an ordinary Windows share, it usually can. Treat it as an additional local copy alongside a real solution, never as the only one.
Pros
Cons
Best for: A secondary local copy, or a genuine stopgap for a single server while you budget for something real. Not a strategy on its own.
Cheap local storage, and where the 3-2-1 rule usually breaks
A NAS is a sensible and inexpensive target for the local copy in a 3-2-1 arrangement, and Synology in particular ships capable backup software of its own. The problem is what Indian SMEs frequently do next: treat the NAS as the entire backup strategy. It sits in the same building as the servers, on the same network, reachable with the same credentials — so it survives a disk failure and nothing else. Fire, flood, theft and ransomware all take the servers and the NAS together. Use it as the fast local restore tier, and replicate from it to cloud or immutable storage.
Pros
Cons
Best for: The fast local restore tier in a proper 3-2-1 design, always replicated onward to cloud or immutable storage.
For a small business running virtual machines, Veeam if you have IT support and Acronis if you do not — Acronis is simpler and bundles security in the same agent. For a business with no dedicated IT at all, Druva at ₹2,400 per endpoint per year removes the most common failure entirely, because there is no backup server to quietly stop working. Whichever you choose, verify that immutable backups are available and switched on.
Veeam, and it is not particularly close. Image-level Hyper-V backups, instant VM recovery that boots a machine directly from the backup while the full restore runs behind it, and application-aware processing so SQL Server and Active Directory restore consistently rather than crash-consistent. Acronis handles Hyper-V competently and is easier to administer, so it is a reasonable second choice for a small estate with a small team.
Both, which is what the 3-2-1 rule is describing. On-premise gives fast restores — recovering a terabyte over the LAN takes minutes, over a 50 Mbps connection it takes most of a day. Cloud gives the offsite copy that survives fire, flood and theft. The standard arrangement is a local copy to NAS or attached storage for speed, replicated to immutable cloud storage for survival. Choosing only one leaves you either slow to recover or vulnerable to losing the site.
Cloud-native options are the easiest to price: Druva at ₹2,400 per endpoint per year and ₹2,800 per user per year for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Veeam and Acronis license per workload or per socket and typically land in the ₹15,000-60,000 per server per year range depending on edition and features. Add storage — cloud object storage runs about ₹2 per GB per month at standard tiers, considerably less on archive tiers. Windows Server Backup is free and, as covered above, not sufficient on its own.
Yes, and this is one of the most consistently misunderstood points in the field. Microsoft and Google guarantee their infrastructure, not your data: they protect against their own outages, not against an employee deleting a mailbox, a ransomware infection syncing encrypted files into OneDrive, or a departing staff member wiping a shared drive. Retention windows are short and recovery beyond them is not possible. Third-party SaaS backup runs around ₹2,800 per user per year and is straightforwardly worth it.
Immutable backups cannot be modified or deleted for a defined retention period, regardless of what credentials an attacker holds. You need them. Modern ransomware specifically seeks out and encrypts backup repositories before triggering the visible attack, precisely because it makes paying more likely. Immutability is the single control that breaks that plan. Confirm your provider offers it, confirm it is enabled — it commonly is not by default — and confirm the retention period is longer than your likely detection time.
Set the frequency from your Recovery Point Objective — how much data you can afford to lose. Nightly backup means losing up to a day of work, which is fine for a file server and unacceptable for an ERP or accounting database. Common practice is nightly full or incremental backups for general file data, plus transaction-log backups every 15 to 60 minutes for databases. Decide the tolerable loss first and let it dictate the schedule rather than the other way round.
Test a restore. A backup job reporting success and a restore producing a working system are entirely different claims, and the gap between them is where most disasters actually happen. Schedule a real restore test twice a year, restore to isolated hardware or an isolated VM, and confirm applications start and data is current. Expect the first attempt to surface something mundane — a missing licence key, an expired credential, an undocumented dependency. Finding those on a Tuesday afternoon is the entire purpose.
Not certain your backups would restore? We run a free backup and DR readiness check across your servers — WhatsApp +91 98119 98370.