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Azure Backup vs StorageCraft ShadowXafe [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Backup
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (14th)
StorageCraft ShadowXafe [EOL]
Average Rating
0.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Sanjay Sahu - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Capgemini
Has supported secure data storage with incremental backups and centralized monitoring
Azure Backup supports all the features that we need, so additional features are not an immediate need for me. The documentation for Azure Backup seems okay for me; it is good overall, but it should be more descriptive for each item. It should elaborate more on how backup and restore are fulfilled in different scenarios. One of the reviews indicates that Azure Backup needs improvements for specific backup options beyond just full VM snapshots. I believe it should be improved actually. Regarding specific backup options, I say there should be improvements compared to how they provided them in older days.
reviewer1281621 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder/CEO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
An expensive next-generation data recovery and backup software solution with poor data restoration
Their restoration protocols could be better. I pulled all my clients out of their cloud mostly because I wasn't confident that they could restore out of the cloud. This was backed up by friends who had been burned by stuff like that. We moved away because of the lack of resources to restore from a potential catastrophic failure. It's challenging, and in some cases, they couldn't do it because they didn't have enough resources. For example, if there was a major disaster, and everybody needed their images out of the cloud, they couldn't give them to everybody.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The fact that Azure Backup is integrated is one of its biggest advantages."
"It's stable."
"You can select the tiering for your backup and manage your cost."
"Automation provides us more time to work on other tasks, avoiding repetitive tasks and saving hours that we can allocate elsewhere. This gives more free time for involvement in other activities instead of repetitive data pulling."
"The tool has a lot of features."
"You have the flexibility to encrypt your backups and choose the storage capacity you're comfortable paying for."
"The product is cost-effective compared to other vendors."
"The most valuable feature of Azure Backup is its simplicity."
"I like that they have some new devices that are simpler to use because they kind of tie right into the cloud."
"The most valuable feature is the backups."
 

Cons

"On-prem can be complex to set up but the cloud is simple."
"Microsoft's technical support for Azure products could be improved."
"I once tried restoring a Linux environment, and the size of the Linux VM or the data disk was really huge. It took a really long time to restore the environment and send the data from the storage to the disk. It took around 25 to 30 minutes, which was much longer than I anticipated. They can improve the duration of such restore operations. In the next release, it would also be good if they could reduce the duration for transferring the data from their storage to the actual storage while creating a virtual machine. They can reduce the duration or increase the data transfer rate."
"The solution should involve more redundancy types in the backup storage and support open-source OS."
"The reporting functionality of Azure Backup needs improvement."
"The only thing I would say that could be improved is the reporting."
"Azure Backup's licensing model is very challenging because it doesn't give a clear picture."
"Technical support can be slow to respond at times."
"Their restoration protocols could be better. I pulled all my clients out of their cloud mostly because I wasn't confident that they could restore out of the cloud. This was backed up by friends who had been burned by stuff like that. We moved away because of the lack of resources to restore from a potential catastrophic failure. It's challenging, and in some cases, they couldn't do it because they didn't have enough resources. For example, if there was a major disaster, and everybody needed their images out of the cloud, they couldn't give them to everybody."
"StorageCraft ShadowXafe should improve the on-premises console management controls and protection and recovery."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Considering the fact that our company's enterprise-sized customers use the solution, the product's price is fine and is not on the higher side of the spectrum."
"The price is somewhat high and could be lower."
"Price-wise, it's similar to AWS."
"Overall, its cost is better because the VMs are already there, and whatever you back up, there is only the additional cost of that storage, whereas if I have to use Avamar in Azure, a separate cost is there for the Avamar server, and in addition, whatever I take as a backup, there is a separate license with Avamar for that. So, there is a double cost if we have to use Avamar in the cloud."
"Pay as you go is the pricing model."
"The product is neither too expensive nor too cheap."
"The pricing of the solution does not depend on the service itself but rather on the minimum data volume encountered. This pricing approach seems reasonable and is on par with other competitors in the market. It is a good solution for on-premise needs because it is more cost-effective. When evaluating the overall financial expenditure, including operational costs and the impact on the IT team, Azure Backup is a favorable choice."
"It's around $10 to $15 per month per virtual machine, along with something extra based on the size of the data."
"They are more expensive than some of the others out there. We have gone away from their cloud due to pricing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise23
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How does Azure Backup differ from Veeam Backup & Replication?
Veeam has a version for Azure but there are organizations, like ours, that are considering moving to an Azure environment and wonder if Azure Backup is better than Veeam Backup and Replication (Vee...
What do you like most about Azure Backup?
Azure Backup is easy to configure and restore.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Backup?
The pricing of Azure Backup is fine; it is a low-cost solution.
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Also Known As

No data available
ShadowXafe
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Russell Reynolds Associates, Somerset County Council, Kardem, PCL Construction
Kawasaki, NASA, Amazon, Sonic, Callaway
Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Commvault and others in Backup and Recovery. Updated: December 2025.
879,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.