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BDRShield vs Carbonite Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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

BDRShield
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
21st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (10th), MSP Backup (2nd)
Carbonite Server
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
56th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (46th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of BDRShield is 0.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Carbonite Server is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BDRShield0.9%
Carbonite Server1.0%
Other98.1%
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Thomas Roes - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Switact
Ease of backup and restore improves data management with reliable support
The interface of BDRSuite Backup & Replication is pretty intuitive. Regarding their marketing strategy, I'm very bad at marketing. I always get a little edgy when people try to shove their product in my face. There are two sides to the story. If you don't know something exists, you might not even start to look for it unless you really know that you need it. If you are explicitly looking for a solution, then you'll find it. People that don't know that they should do backup don't have a place in IT. I rate BDRSuite Backup & Replication 8.5 out of 10.
CP
Backup, storage and disaster recovery technical specialist at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
A reliable backup product which needs little management
For most technical users the setup and initial deployment are fairly straightforward and once deployed it 99% of the time looks after itself. Installation of the agents is similar to most other products in that it has an install wizard to guide you, the accompanying documentation is also very useful to assist wherever you are in the agent install and policy setup process. Normally our customers' IT team does the deployment of agents, however, this isn't a daunting task unless you are dealing with multiple servers to protect the product. On a server-by-server basis, the deployment doesn't take long. From the MSP side of things, the infrastructure sitting behind the scenes doesn't take too much to install, configure and maintain.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the ability, from a console, to manage the different computers to be backed up."
"I am able to run Vembu on Windows NAS, which is beneficial. It does install on a Windows-based NAS. You can have the server running from the location where you are storing backups. You don't need a separate server for it in this case."
"The best part of BDRSuite is how user-friendly it is and how it does not require any maintenance after the initial setup."
"The product is very reliable and works well out of the box; many of our customers are buying it."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features for me are that I can back up the entire virtual machine, but when restoring I can restore at the file level."
"Vembu provides us with a way to instantly recover data. It offers instant data recovery through a local backup server deployed at the customer's site. We can quickly recover data either by copying it back to the main server or if the backup server is powerful enough, we can also directly start a virtual machine from the backup."
"It seems reliable and easy to use."
"The solution is very stable."
"The solution is a free engine to help work with the container."
"Easy verification of things is the most valuable feature."
"The efficiency and convenience are excellent."
"I find the BMR/image and the recovery pieces are valuable."
"Technical support handled all our issues quickly and effectively."
"The Granular Restore of SQL feature has been a lifesaver more times than I can count. One of the main reasons for looking at Carbonite was their support for platforms like AIX and AS/400 Series."
 

Cons

"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... 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?"
"There's a feature that does syncing with AWS Cloud backup online. It's not that straightforward to get it set up."
"It is not a well-known software. People do not know about Vembu."
"Our initial experience with BDRSuite highlighted the need for improved user onboarding materials."
"It's not that stable yet. Every two weeks, my backup will stop and I have to check it."
"The API uses a common data image to store the data for the sets, but unfortunately, it's limited to consecutive sets only. That's the only limitation I have observed so far."
"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."
"It is very easy, unless you know exactly what you're doing, to corrupt the virtual machines and they get locked up. Just brief detail: When you are creating a system, if you don't have absolutely every other little background processes in place, it creates Snapshots of the virtual machines. Once it does that, it then won't be able to have a backup. From that point on you have to destroy the virtual machine, which is completely counterproductive on a large system. There is a fundamental flaw in the setup that can be very dangerous, potentially."
"The Hyper-V backup has room for improvement."
"In the next release I would like to see an improvement in the auto failover option."
"They do not yet have USB recovery but they are adding it in coming releases."
"The only thing that I would like to see improved is related to marketing. Currently, it is very difficult to find the right paper and stuff for me. Their marketing department should provide better information because currently, it is very difficult to find information on the internet. It was bought over by OpenText, and you won't be able to find a lot of information about this solution on their site. They should also provide training facilities for commercial purposes. Some of my colleagues recently went for pilot training, and they were technical. If I want to get trained, the training has to be more commercial. Currently, there is no such training for users like me."
"The support for object storage isn't quite there yet. Its public cloud support can be improved. I would love to see the public cloud support for object storage, and it would be great, but what I always hear from the folks at Carbonite is that in a lot of cases, it directly competes with their cloud offering. So, I don't know when or where that will go or if that will go anywhere, but we are hopeful to see something. The dashboard is a little outdated. If they gave it a facelift and put some better design around their dashboard, that would be tremendous. I generally care less about the visual aesthetics of an application as long as it does what it needed to do, which is true in the case of this solution. We also have the Microsoft 365 platform. Because they're two separate platforms, I have to log in to my Microsoft platform to manage it, and I have to log into my Carbonite server backup platform to manage it. Having these two coexist together in one management console is really what we're looking for, but we went for it knowing this. We also knew that there would be some integration coming down the road. So, we're again hoping to see some of that coming in 2021."
"The stability has room for improvement."
"It could be a little bit easier or faster to be able to access data files without having to download anything."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"BDRSuite, although cost-efficient, is more expensive than most other providers."
"The pricing is fair."
"I do remember that the pricing was based on a VMware or Hyper-V license, whereas on our end, it should be regarded as a VM-based license. I don't know why they make a difference at the Vembu level. We are currently on VMware migrating to Hyper-V, and we didn't want to buy licenses for VMware, but still have to buy them for Hyper-V. This the only thing which does not seem fully adequate."
"The pricing is reasonable. I am okay with it."
"At the moment, I am doing Vembu for one host. My costs are about $25 USD a month for a single host up to 100 VMs."
"Take a look at the pricing and licensing closely. When we installed the BDR disaster recovery server, which is the duplication of the backup data on one server onto a second one where the backup data resides, it was not clear that this DR server needed two other licenses. These licenses were to back up the copy of the first backup server that had two licenses for the two physical host that it was backing up in the first place. Moving files around to a second DR server, why would I need an extra two licenses? I don't know if it's to make money, but it was not very obvious and I had to abort the project from there because I didn't plan to pay for extra licenses to copy data of the first two physical servers. I also didn't understand why it was needed. Hopefully, they will improve the explanation in the documentation for this."
"Its price is fair, and they still allow perpetual licensing, which is extremely important for us. They also have offline licensing. I am not aware of any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. In terms of the affordability of the solution for businesses with a tight budget, you aren't going to beat it."
"The high availability is too expensive for our customers."
"We pay 9,000 dollars per year for our license."
"The solution is open source."
"The pricing is between $120 and $150 per year."
"Its price is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
19%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Performing Arts
7%
Marketing Services Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise1
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BDRSuite?
BDRSuite is cost-effective because you can purchase a perpetual license that covers multiple environments. You only renew the support costs annually. It offers advanced features at roughly 75 perce...
What needs improvement with BDRSuite?
I really don't know what could be improved about BDRSuite Backup & Replication. I've never had anything that I thought would be nice if that was possible. Every time I thought that, it was alre...
What is your primary use case for BDRSuite?
BDRSuite Backup & Replication is used in my company and I recommend it to my customers.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Vembu BDRSuite, BDRSuite Backup & Replication
Carbonite Recover Backup
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA, Intel, CISCO, PHILIPS, Atos, HEXAWARE, Motorola
INLINE Commercial Construction, Hamilton County
Find out what your peers are saying about BDRShield vs. Carbonite Server and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,192 professionals have used our research since 2012.