The Story of Backup Exec and NetBackup

Backup Exec and NetBackup are among the oldest and most successful backup software in the history of the worldwide storage industry. Just an example: UK company Storage Online Limited is almost entirely specialized in DR for customers using Backup Exec with several recovery sites.

                          The history of Backup Exec and NetBackup
                                           
(Source: Symantec)

The history of Backup Exec (Source: mainly Symantec)

The story began in 1982 in a Florida suburb, where Kim and Alison Knapp started Maynard Electronics in their living room. PC were gaining in popularity, and the  industry was open to anyone willing to invest sweat equity. For Maynard, that meant developing and delivering floppy disk subsystems, hard drive subsystems, and tape drive subsystems to various channel vendors for integration into PCs before they were shipped to customers.  
 
In the early to mid 80s, PCs were inherently unreliable. Tape drives emerged as relatively inexpensive insurance to backup data in the likely event of a system failure. Maynard spotted a business opportunity by adding software drivers to PCs to simplify the backup process and drive incremental sales of tape drives. The initial software was a simple menu interface that shipped with every MaynStream Tape subsystem.  
 
In 1989, Maynard was acquired by Archive Corporation, the largest manufacturer of tape drives at the time. Following the introduction of MaynStream version 3.1, it was expanded to other OS and eventually was running on DOS, OS/2, Windows, and NetWare. The OEM version of the software was dubbed Archive Information Manager.
 
In the early 1990s, Conner Peripherals acquired Archive and work commenced on the development of a backup utility for Microsoft Windows NT. The product name, Archive Information Manager, was easily forgettable and difficult to market, so the product management teams set out to rename the software after its primary function, backup. But not just any backup, the new name would need to convey that the software was inherently better at backup than anyone else – the executive of backup if you will. Names were bantered around, but the name that stuck and lives to this day is Backup Exec.
 
As excitement was growing for ‘Chicago’ – later to be known as Microsoft Windows 95 -, Conner kept running into a competitor by the name of Quest. Both companies were pursuing the lucrative Microsoft business, so Conner acquired Quest and their partnership deals with all of the major OEM tape drive vendors. The combined company – known as Arcada Software – became the leader in tape backup, with the ability to back up both servers and desktops.  
 
As the hard drive business consolidated in the 90s and profit margins eroded rapidly, Seagate Technology began looking for new opportunities. The high margin backup software business appeared increasingly appealing, so Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals in order to get Arcada Software and Backup Exec software.
 
In parallel, the Unix market was also a lucrative business for another rapidly growing company, Veritas Software. Seagate was looking for a partner in Unix and Veritas was looking for a partner in Windows. In 1999, Veritas acquired Seagate Software’s network management group for $1.6 billion and along with it, Backup Exec software. Under the name Veritas Backup Exec, innovation continued on the product. Backup Exec 7 arrives in 1997 and version 9.0 in 2003.
 
Then in December of 2004, Symantec got Veritas Software for $11 billion. The goal: help customers balance the need to both secure their information and make it available, thus ensuring its integrity. Backup Exec 10 was released in January 2005, then the version 11d in November 2006, and finally Backup Exec 2010 with de-dupe in January 2010.
 

The history of NetBackup (Source: mainly Wikipedia)

A backup software solution was written by a small group of engineers at Control Data for Chrysler Corporation in 1987, and later adopted by other customers of Control Data.

Control Data formed the Automated Workstation Backup System (AWBUS) business unit in 1990. The first version of AWBUS supported two tape drives in a single robotic carousel with the SGI Irix operating system.

In 1993, Control Data renamed the product to BackupPlus 1.0. (This is why many NetBackup commands have a ‘bp’ prefix.) Support for media Volume Management and Server Migration/Hierarchical Storage Management was added.

In the end of 1993, the product and Control Data’s Storage Management 12-person team were acquired by Openvision. This is why, on Unix platforms, NetBackup installs into /usr/openv. During this time, Open Vision renamed Backup Plus to NetBackup.

On May 6, 1997 Veritas acquired Openvision for $400 million, NetBackup formally becoming a Veritas product.

In 2005, Symantec acquired Veritas and NetBackup entered into Symantec’s portfolio. Also at that time, the 30th version of NetBackup was released as NetBackup 6.0, and then the version 7 with de-dupe in January 2010.