BDRShield Reviews

We use it primarily for backups and restoration of data, for disaster recovery purposes. We back up our file servers as well as our access control servers. We use it for standard, physical Windows 2016 servers, at this stage.

The key things we use in this solution thus far are only the backup portion, the recovery, and the reports. We will try to make use of it more extensively, but for now it's working for us.

It's on-prem at this stage, but we would love at a later stage to go to the cloud.

• The dashboard is very nice. 
• The solution is very user-friendly. 

When you're looking at your dashboard, you can see all your active jobs. You can see exactly if they're successful or failed and you can actually drill down and see what caused the problem. The fact you can see that right away is nice. 

It's a very simple layout, but effective. What you see is what you get. Some dashboards have these funny graphs and a lot of information. But what I want to know is, number-one, what jobs are running? What type of jobs are running? And I want to know what the job status is. If it's a red "X" I know I have to investigate. If it's a green checkmark then I know I don't have to stress about it, it has actually backed up what I've selected. It's simple. That's what you want.

What I would love to see on the dashboard are graphs, per backup  job. I want to see the month and the days in it. It doesn't matter what type of graph, but it must just give you more information. Currently it's in text format and you have to click on it and investigate. It would be nice if I could see information in a small chart as well. If a job has failed, when did it actually fail and what percentage of it failed? Did it fail completely, 75 percent or 100 percent or did it only fail partially?

Then we would know we have to look at settings, or maybe there's a permission issue, or maybe the unit was offline. Currently it's just showing a red "X" and you have to go in to have a look. If it gave you some information such as "100 percent complete, successful," and not just a checkmark, and if it failed it would tell you, "75 percent successful," then you would know more.

We've only been using the product for three months, and only on three servers.

It's very stable, unless you have somebody messing around. Otherwise, it should not have any issues.

It's scalable. It's similar to industry standard backup and disaster recovery solutions, like Veeam. 

We want to move to the cloud at a later stage, and we also want to do backups of Office 365. We're in the process of moving from webmail to Office 365. Once we're there, we're going to use the same platform to make backups of critical user data and mailboxes.

Although Office 365 has retention and backup solutions in place, we prefer to use Vembu in addition, on top of that, for our high-level users, to be 100 percent sure. Microsoft can maybe give you 30 or 60 days of retention, but if you have your own backups, you can go back to one year, based on the typical needs of users.

Once we have our Office 365 portion up and running and maybe one or two email users, I would love to perform a backup online. The challenge we have is that our upload is a bit slow. We might need to use a satellite link, but within the next month or two we should have a solution and the internet should not be a problem. Then we can most probably run some of these backups from the cloud version. The idea is to ultimately move to the cloud.

Currently, the information we back up is for about 60 to 80 active users, across all the employees in the company.

The salespeople I've dealt with are fantastic; they are great people. They wanted the solution to work and they only stopped phoning me the moment I told them, "Listen, I'm alright. I'm okay now." They wanted to make sure that the application was working and meeting our needs. That was very nice.

And obviously, you can contact them anytime and they will help you. Their technical support is great. It's top-notch. The turnaround time is quick. The last time I contacted the person I have always dealt with, within a couple of hours he contacted me. It's not like it's 24 hours or 48 hours, it's less than that. It is good.

It's a very nice, easy, and economical solution. I'm coming from a Veeam background, but Veeam is a bit expensive. That's why we opted for Vembu. I tested out the Vembu trial version and found that it has a lovely interface, it's easy to work with, and it's something I can teach quickly. With Veeam, you must attend courses to understand it; you can't just show somebody. If I'm on leave, or I'm leaving the company, I can give anybody in my position a quick rundown.

The company I'm supporting now is not a corporate company or a listed company. The company I used to work for was a listed company and they were forced by the auditors to use a certain type of backup solution but it was expensive. When I started with this smaller company, they didn't have any backups. If something happened they would lose all their information. I was browsing the web looking for an economical but effective solution to meet the needs of this organization. I was surprised, as I had never heard about Vembu. But I checked them out and that's where the journey started with Vembu.

It's cost-effective for us.

The initial setup is straightforward. And what was nice was that I had somebody on the line to talk me through it, just to make sure. You're allowed to play around with it to get more familiar with it. Coming from a Veeam background I tried not to compare it with that. I had to work with it to make 100 percent sure that I appreciated Vembu.

I figured out most of the things by myself because it's straightforward. It's very easy if you have some form of IT or backup background. It should not be a challenge or an issue. Maybe if you're brand new to computers it could be a challenge but if you have some experience with running backups it's easy to work with.

The deployment was done within two days because we don't have a big setup. It was just me involved in the setup, from our side, and for maintenance I have an IT assistant. If I'm not there, he can handle it as well.

My experience working with the Vembu person during the setup was good. They are very proud of the product. They want it to work.

It's still too early for us to see ROI. 

But the annual cost is so low that it's going to be difficult to calculate a return on investment. But if we are going to do backups of Office 365 and those types of things, the business might see ROI, because then you're working with a lot of user information as well, and they can see the reports.

It's more affordable than Veeam, so smaller companies can afford to have a solution like this in place, which is very nice.

For three licenses we pay not even 3,000 Rand per annum, which is a bargain with what you're getting. It's not expensive if you compare it with the counterpart.

I didn't evaluate any other options other than testing Veeam for a month. I know that product and it's fantastic, but when it came to going from trial version to live version, it was a bit expensive. I went for Vembu because I could pay a third of the price and get the same service.

When I look at a product like this there are a couple of basic things it must do: 

• I must be able to access it easily, deploy it easily
• It must be secure. 
• If I want to make changes, updates must be easy as well. 
• It must be integratable, compatible with different operating systems. 

Vembu ticked all the boxes.

Do you know when a business starts to appreciate a backup solution? When it loses information and needs to recover it. If your senior management is not very risk-minded or they tend to see these things as a waste of money, the moment they lose information and you can restore it within no time, they start to respect the product and they are more than willing, when you go to them for upgrades or improvements, to actually pay for them because they know you're adding value to the business. It's not just an expense.

For a small company like ours, I would rate Vembu at eight out of 10, because while the dashboard is very nice, there are some things that the major backup solutions provide as a stock-standard, like the graphing information. Most backup solutions offer it standard. I also give it eight out of 10 because I want them to improve, but it would be nice to move closer to 10. It may take them a while to get there, but with Vembu I can sleep. I don't have to worry and that's good.

Currently, we use Vembu for weekly backups of our virtual infrastructure and monthly backups for separate, confidential data.

We use it only with VMware.

If our country is hit by a meteor, I have secured data in another country on the other side of the world. Then, I can start the restore process immediately with this solution.

There is an option to back up a specific folder from a specific source, not the whole virtual machine. 

The encryption is a must in these days. You can't do anything without encryption of your traffic or data.

The compression is unusable in every scenario because the data that we backup is too different, according to each type. Therefore, the compression is not applicable everywhere. So, we don't use the compression at all.

They can work on their cloud solution. In these days, the data becomes too much and you have to back up a lot of data to the site. They could offer cheaper storage to their clients with the cloud, making this a single source of truth solution. In our project, we are using two service providers: One who offers our storage and another who offers the software. If they work on their cloud solution and can offer their clients lower prices for this type of storage, this would be a really good improvement.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had any issues with the software, like crashing or freezing.

I don't have any of the reservations about the scalability because we currently use it on a single machine. 

We have about three users who are part of the IT department, including two senior administrators and me, as IT manager.

Our account manager has provided us with great information and support. He is always on time. I haven't needed to wait more than two hours to read the answers to my questions.

Three years ago, we started the project to duplicate our infrastructure in every single aspect and needed to create daily backups of our virtual machines.

We picked Vembu two years ago, but switched to another solution which comes with integrated backup for virtual machines. This year, we start another project, which is to create offsite backups somewhere in the world. There were some requirements: the backup storage to be encrypted, the transfer to be encrypted, and not be so expensive. So, I looked at Vembu and Vinchin again. We were only satisfied with this tool (Vembu) when we started talking about money, because it was cheaper and could easily encrypt our non-dedicated storage.

The initial setup was as easy as one, two, three. I downloaded the software, then ran the application. They have a perfect documentation section on their website where you can find what you need: this tutorial.

Our deployment was about an hour.

We always start any project with a deployment strategy. This includes some type of testing. We go in with the result that we want and compare the software with our requirements. If it fits, then we start to reach the end result.

Currently, our whole offsite backup project, including Vembu, is about $500 per year to back up everything that we have. It is a lot of data, about 50 terabytes.

I find the licensing model to be valuable. The payment model is done with a set price or per virtual machine, and it is also done annually or on a permanent basis. You can choose whichever licensing model you prefer.

For our company, the current price of Vembu against Veeam is a few times cheaper. In our infrastructure, if we picked Veeam, we would have to pay about $20,000 per year. Now, we are currently paying about $2,000 per year for Vembu. You can do the math. The price is great.

Money always matters, so it could be cheaper, but this is not realistic for the market.

When we started to look for this type of software, we had to choose between Veeam, Vembu, or Vinchin. Vinchin is a new player on the market. 

We integrated a service provide into our own solution. This is why I picked Vembu at first, because it can be integrated with a third-party service provider and was the only software able to be integrated into our solution. Vembu offers a cloud offsite service, which is a type of Vembu storage where you can store your backups if you don't have other options.

Vinchin is easier to use with simpler interfaces. However, when you read the features, because it is new software in the market, there were not some functions built-in, like encryption. Vembu encrypts the traffic when it transfers it to its destination. According to our Vinchin and Vembu comparison, Vembu is pretty complicated against Vinchin, but Vembu is easier to install and update.

Reasons why we went with Vembu:

1. The price. 
2. The integration option. 
3. They offered a lot of additional features that we don't use currently, but you never know what you will need in the future.

The software is currently satisfying our needs for us. We aren't using all of Vembu features at the moment.

We use data reservation in our offsite data backup.

It is compatible with almost everything that exists on the market. It's compatible with VMware and Hyper-V. With VMware, it works very well. We haven't had any issues so far. 

I would advise to try it and not to look at the prices of the top players on the market, though do look at alternative software. Sometimes, you need to try more than one or two solutions, then switch to whichever one is better. Pretty often, we speak to some not-so famous product or company to complete our approach.

I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10.

Our daily scheduled backups are only with Vembu. We are using the disk based solution only.

We are a business school.

We have restored with the full backup. It was completely fine using Quick VM Recovery. The time frame depends on the size of the server, e.g., if it is 100 GB, then it will take an hour. Restoring would not be possible without Vembu.

Because all our servers are hosted on VMware, the VMware backup is the most valuable feature. The integration and backup with VMware are very good. 

The compression is fine because it is compressing the full backup files. For example, if our full backup is 100 GB, then it can be reduced down between 40 GB to 80 GB.

There are some limitation in Vembu that can be improved. When you take the backup from any server, the full incremental backup is limited. For example, if you run a weekly full backup and monthly backup, they cannot be run at the same time. I should not have to create a new job, but in this scenario, I am creating two jobs. The limitation is created because if I select monthly backup, then I cannot select weekly backup.

We have only been working with Vembu for a few months.

The performance is good. There are no issues with performance.

Backups are run at night, then we check them in the morning. We don't do active maintenance.

If we have multiple jobs running at the same time, then the performance will be reduced, e.g., if you run four or five jobs at once. If only one job is running, then the solution can be very fast.  

It is deployed across our entire network, but we have a very small environment.

Their technical support is good and helpful. Their response time is as we expect it to be. If I raise a case, they will come back to me within half an hour to an hour at maximum.

Previously, we used Veeam Backup, but we replaced it with Vembu. We switched because Vembu is more cost-effective. So, price was a factor.

The initial setup is straightforward and doesn't take much time.

It takes two people to deploy it, e.g., a backup admin and I deployed it.

This solution has help us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduced budgets.

With our manual backups, we can combine two or three jobs into one, taking three hours. We are reducing our time spent on backups by approximately two-thirds.

One month ago, we subscribed for one year.

At another organization, I have worked with Dell EMC NetWorker and Commvault (about two or three years ago). Dell EMC NetWorker can do the weekly and monthly backups that Vembu cannot.

We are not using the deduplication feature. I am not 100 percent sure how the deduplication works on Vembu.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of 10. The product is good, but they need to resolve the multiple policies issue that is currently restricting us on the server.

We are using the Enterprise version for backup. With the license that we have now, I'm using the NetworkBackup application. This includes having email backup with MS Exchange Server, which is very helpful because we can restore by mailbox or mail. We don't have to restore the entire server.

We also have FAS, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and MySQL databases. It is very easy to use with them.

I have some virtual machines. I use an VMware ESXi server to back them up.

I have a strategy in the company where everyone needs to bring all their important files on the server. People should not be keeping their folders on their computer because of two types of situations:

1. In the last two months, there were situations where the local hard drive failed, people were very happy to have their files on the server. 
2. There have been three times where people modified the file, then asked me if it's possible to get back the file that they had before, so I used the backup. 

I just started backing up to virtual machines. They are very good if something happens. I can restore to another site. There are a lot of options to restore with virtual machines, such as, mounting on another server to open mount locally and extracting some files. I was very surprised because it seems like we have a lot of options. 

I was very happy seeing that the incremental backup was very nice because the modified files are taken from the number of times it was modified. Thus, if I have a file I modified two years ago, I don't back it up each time.

It backs up from the latest version. I can write there that I need the last three modified images of the file. One image could be from a year ago, another one or two days ago, and the third from three years ago. It does not delete by date.

It is easy to use. There is an offsite DR solution where I can keep an offsite copy of the backups. 

The transfer is encrypted. I checked the storage pool's compression and not a lot of space was used. I was expecting more, which is why I think the compression is good.

I saw that it's not possible to have the last full backup duplicated on our site. Therefore, if I have a lot of information on the main site, I would not want to copy any information to those site servers. It would be nice to be able to make a copy of the last full backup. 

I have sent a lot of missed scheduled emails, but maybe I'm doing something wrong. I will try contacting support to see what I can do better. 

I started two months ago. 

Nothing has happened other than expected until now. We have had no errors.

A system administrator and I are doing deployment and maintenance. He checks the tasks every day.

It's 100 percent scalable because we can add as many servers as we want. 

Their support is great. I think they work 24 hours a day. I get a very quick turnaround time from them no matter the day or time that I send them an email.

A long time ago, I used Symantec Backup. I cannot compare the two solutions.

I was trying to find a backup solution two months ago. I googled for the best backup solution vendors in 2020. I saw Vembu. It was listed as very easy to use and cheap for what it's doing, as a platform. I started a trial (pilot). When I checked the license prices, it was free which was in my budget. I was really happy to find that someone from a management location could do backups using the service.

The price for Vembu was very important and key to our decision-making. Also, Vembu support was very important. When I didn't know how to do anything, I wrote to support and the response time was quick. Basically, it was cheap, easy to install, the agentless backup was very nice, and support was very responsive

The initial setup was very easy. It integrated easily with Windows, Linux, and NetApp backup.

The deployment took about one hour (max) per server.

This solution helps us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduces budgets. 

With the free version of Vembu, you receive three virtual machine backups. However, if you buy the NetworkBackup Enterprise version, you don't have access to the features seen in the free version. This is a situation that Vembu should solve. This caused a misunderstanding between sales and us. I was hoping if I buy the licenses, then after the trial I would not have to purchase virtual machine licenses. Maybe they should offer these three virtual machine backups as part of the Enterprise license.

I tried to install two other solutions. However, I found Vembu very nice because in its trial period, it includes all the features. During the trial period, I was able to check exactly what happens if I use another type of solution from Vembu, and it was easy to test.

I chose this backup solution because it fits what I need.

Try it and see what it can deliver. It is very easy to test and check the licenses. 

The only situation that was not what I expected: I need to have a full copy of the backup, plus a live session of the back up which involves a lot of copies. I need a lot of hard drive capacity offshore and offsite.

I don't know how to check the deduplication.

Our primary use case is for VM backups.

We were using an older version and just upgraded two weeks ago.

The virtual machine backup is important for stability and scalability since our servers are on virtual machines. 

Another good thing is that it has cloud backup.

There are bugs. For one month, I encountered a big issue where my storage pool could not be identified. My backups were stopped because they were not able to locate the storage pool. So, I removed the settings and started the backups again. The application is not stable. It needs some debugging and testing on the build side of production.

We use Vembu with Microsoft Hyper-V. While the installation is not a problem, there is a problem with the operation side of things. It should be automated. There is something wrong with the structure affecting the product because the backup should not be disturbed. We found without any changes to the network structure then the backups would be affected and I could not fix it by myself. I did not contact support for this, as it was probably due to the new update, but I am unsure. Now, I am monitoring this issue.

Six months.

Its application stability needs improvement. I have seen issues recently with it. Backups must have a very stable application. If your backup system is crashing, that means you cannot trust it.

The scalability is good. It can scale. Adding a new server to a foreign location is easy.

We have nine locations. We do have plans to increase usage of the solution. 

The IT department has five people who are administrators. One person configures the backups and others monitor the backups.

The technical support is good.

This BDR is the first proper solution that we are using. We previously used manual backups.

Initially, we had some problems when we tried to do the setup ourselves, but then the support helped us. They had a direct session with me and helped me with the installation. After that, it was fine.

The deployment is easy and fast. A location can be deployed in a day.

For each version, we have a dedicated BDR server and local storage. I schedule the backups. From there, we upload to the cloud storage. Therefore, each location will have their own BDR that will back up to the cloud.

The initial deployment to the cloud is important because once the backups are into operations making changes is not that flexible.

This solution helped us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduced our budget by 50 percent. We spent $3,000 on Vembu's licenses where other solutions were almost double.

The competitor for Vembu is Veeam, who is very popular and famous. Vembu is good, but still has a long way to go. We found Vembu BDR to be more affordable.

Veeam is good for very high-end servers.

Right now, we are satisfied with Vembu's operational performance and requirements. It is just a simple backup solution where we can backup all of our VMs.

Vembu allows you to implement a variety of different requirements.

I would rate the product as a six (out of 10). It needs some more work to be done in regards to product stability and functionality.

We use it to back up ESXi clients, so mainly Linux based or Unix based servers on our ESXi host.

We use the solution to back up our virtual environments (VMware). It has been good for our organization so far.

It makes it possible for us to back up our Unix machines without installing a host, client, or any client software. It gives us some peace of mind in regards to those servers getting backed up.

The number one feature is that we can back up our servers without having to install a client. It is the only reason why I have this product.

The user interface isn't that good. I don't think that the product is user-friendly. Comparing it side by side to Acronis, I would say to Vembu, "Hey, you could make your user interface a little easier."

Vembu will tell you the next scheduled backup, but it doesn't show you the last successful backup. I would have them include a column under "List of Backup Jobs" and have two other columns which say, "Last Successful Backup" and "Next Scheduled Backup", because you don't know now if it's backed up successfully. It just says, "The next scheduled time is this." You don't know from looking at that pane of glass when the last time it actually happened without digging further into reports.

Two years or more.

It is stable. I haven't had it crash or break on me.

I don't think we've actually had a reason to restore a machine as it's never failed. We've never had a server fail. The only thing that it has done for us is give us peace of mind that our server is backed up.

Everybody is impacted if one of these servers failed. The only way we could get it back up and running was to restore it from a Vembu Backup. It would impact everybody if the servers went down, so approximately 3,000 users would be impacted if the backup wasn't successfully happening and we needed to use it.

We haven't had reason to scale it up to back up anything else. We aren't really using the product to its fullest capabilities. I think it has a lot more that it can do.

I am the only user using it, as we only use it for backing up our servers.

I do have plans to increase usage.

Every time I have called, I've had good tech support.

I didn't use a previous solution. I selected this solution because it was the only one I could find for the cost that did what I needed it to do.

It was pretty easy to set up. The initial setup was probably only 15 minutes.

Our implementation strategy was to make it so we could back up our VMware clients. That was the whole purpose of the software. We don't use it for our Windows Servers. For that, we use a different product. However, we couldn't use the other product on the Linux and Unix space machines because the other software requires that a client be installed.

We bought it directly from Vembu and installed it ourselves.

This solution helps us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduces budgets. We are saving $6,000 every three years versus having another product.

Backups are an insurance thing. This is a life insurance policy to make it so if our servers failed, we would have something to get them back. Since we haven't had a server fail, it is just like life insurance. While it has cost us money, it has given us peace of mind that if we needed it, then it would be there.

The pricing is very good.

Our license is about to expire on it.

We did evaluate some other products before choosing this one. 

We also use Acronis Backup Advanced. The way that Vembu backs up to a backup drive, it uses a pool of drives to back up. Whereas, Acronis backs up to just a single file. You can see that individual file on its own. You can browse to it and see that the file that has been saved. It also says the last successful backup it did. 

Vembu's user interface isn't as easy to use compared to Acronis Backup Advanced, which has a better interface for me to be able to see what's happening.

I haven't found a competitor who does as good a job for the money.

This is a good product to choose if you are in the same situation as we are in.

It does do compression and that works fine.

We don't use Hyper-V.

I would give it a five out of 10, because I think that it could use some polishing on the interface for the client.

We use it to backup VMware virtual machines, so I'm backing up my VMware environment. My product is for Windows Server Backup.

We are a small business. We don't use the enterprise version of the solution.

It has improved our business continuity.

We have used this solution to recover from a few incidences. 

The firewall backup is the most valuable feature. We need it sometimes when we recover a single file.

The compression is the most useful feature for me.

The product's stability needs some improvements. 

The support is a bit slow in resolving an issue. It takes a long time to recover.

One year.

The solution is 90 percent stable. It is running well. The availability is good.

Two or three employees are needed for deployment and maintenance of the solution.

I only have two servers. I don't test other servers.

We don't count our users for this solution as it is a backup service.

I would rate the technical support as eight or nine (out of 10). I would like them to improve their response rate.

This was our first product.

The initial setup was neither simple nor complex; it was intermediate. It took four hours to set up/deploy. We implemented it into a very simple environment (Windows Server Backup).

We deployed it ourselves.

We have seen ROI with Vembu. The solution is worth it based on the few times that we used it for recovery.

We tested three products. One of the other products that we evaluated was Altaro.

We chose Vembu because the compatibility was better.

I would definitely recommend Vembu. We have been mostly satisfied with the solution. We plan to keep using it.

Overall, I would rate the product as a nine (out of 10).

I'm using the backup from Vembu for my home lab where I have ESXi. I'm backing up VMware servers. That's all I use it for.  I have Oracle Databases running in these VM machines and I do testing, patches, upgrades, etc. I want to be able to back them up and, if need be, restore them so that I don't have to rebuild them.

I'm running it in a Windows Server in a VM machine. I have ESXi 6.7 running on a Dell PowerEdge R720 and I have a Windows 10 VM running in that. And in that I have the Vembu BDR running as my backup server.

It helps me with restores. I can repeat a test multiple times: Do the test, the restore, and then test again. It saves me time because I don't have to rebuild the VMs every time; rather, I just do a restore. I would estimate it's saving me four to eight hours every time I have to do a restore.

I also had a disk crash and the restore was important because I didn't have to rebuild it. So it helps with data recovery as well.

It gives me peace of mind because I don't have to do the rebuilds. In a home lab, documentation is not usually at the forefront of your thoughts. You are just trying to get it built and tested. Having the ability to back it up and restore without having to remember all the options were that you had installed and what was the data like before, it gives me peace of mind that I have the restore.

The two features that I use are the backup and the restore.

The only thing with room for improvement, as everybody says, since I'm in a home lab, would be the price for the CPU; the cost. If I were to add another CPU, I would start to get into an expense where I would question, "Do I really want to continue backing this stuff up?" But from what I could tell, this was definitely the least expensive option to go with.

I have been using it for about eight months. I bought my first license in April and then I had to buy another one because I added another ESXi server. I have two licenses and they're both for five years. My intention is to be using it for five years and I won't be switching out.

I'm on the most recent version because I just upgraded when it came out.

It has been very stable. There haven't been any issues.

I have it licensed on two CPUs, one CPU in each machine, and it has not had a problem with the 40 VMs that I have.

The only way I would be increasing usage would be if the cost would allow me to add it to another machine. The other machine I'd like to add it to has two CPUs in it, so I would be doubling my license cost. Right now, that's not an option.

For the issues that I've had, the tech support has been very good. I've had no complaints and they've been very responsive. I've only had three or four issues, and they have all been resolved. That has been a very good experience.

The last reason I had to contact support was for a restore that I needed to do. I also moved ESXi servers, so I had to have some assistance because the backup was done on one ESXi server and then I moved it to another ESXi server. I needed to do the restore and tech support assisted with that.

There has never been a situation where I had tiered tech support, where the first person I got didn't know and handed me off to the next person who handed me off to the next person.

Veeam was what I was using before I went to Vembu. 

The wording, when you start Googling this stuff, gets kind of questionable because it says "unlimited free VMs." That really isn't true. You can only do a couple before you can't do anything with it. Veeam was the one I was using first. But when I hit my third VM, it wasn't working anymore. You could only actually do three and you would have to roll out one before you could roll in one. 

The initial set up was very easy. It was just like installing anything on Windows 10. It took about 15 minutes.

The first time around I did it myself. I did move it from one VM machine to another VM machine and I had assistance with that from Vembu, and that assistance was very helpful. That was part of standard tech support.

As far as competitors' prices go, Vembu was definitely better than all the competitors I found.

I would guess it has saved me 30 to 50 percent. The problem is that I'm a single-person home lab, so I have no idea what kind of licensing things happen for a corporation which is looking to buy 500 CPUs. If you were to do that and you were to look at the cost per CPU versus my cost per CPU, theirs might be 50 percent less than what I'm paying.

Veeam was one of the solutions within a list of solutions I evaluated. Cost was definitely one of the big differences, but I didn't use Veeam long enough to go down that path. When I hit the third VM, which was within the day that I started using it, I stopped using it.

Make sure you plan out your backup server for the long-term. When I did this I moved my backup server. When I moved it from one machine to another machine and the IP address changed, there were some headaches. I had to get the knowledge documents and I had to get tech support involved to help me outside of the knowledge document. So try to plan out, for as long as you can plan out, that this is the server, it isn't changing, etc.

It has worked as expected. It's straightforward for backing up and it's straightforward for doing the restores. Other than the navigation and what buttons to push, there's really no learning curve here.

I'm not using the encryption. If the deduplication is in use, it must be so by default because I have not done anything with it.

For what I need it to do, and compared to the other products that are out there, this is the most cost-efficient and best solution for my needs.