N-able Cove Data Protection Reviews

Our main use cases for enabling N-able Cove Data Protection include backing up our customers' data on servers hosted in data centers and servers hosted in our own data center, as well as a few onsite, on-prem servers, but mostly hosted servers. The servers are VMs, guests, and a few Hyper-Vs.

We are quite satisfied with this solution because it's both cheap and can do almost everything we need, although the disadvantages are in the Microsoft 365 restore especially and search for data, which has quite a lot of limitations.

We used to use SkyKick, which is now ConnectWise, where you could just search for a word in the 365 backup, making it very easy to find a mail or a document. That's not quite as good in Cohesity backup; however, it can do almost anything, the storage is not expensive, and for file backup, it has all kinds of advanced options, even simulated restore, and checks that images can boot up.

The integration of N-able Cove Data Protection into our existing infrastructure is easy.

These policies help us meet our needs to specify an SLA, service level agreement, for how we back up and also make monthly archive backups and keep older archive backups if it's required in the SLA.

We're an MSP, so we have many different clients. We use Cove software for backing up workstations and servers.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud.

My customers are all offsite. I use the solution from a management console standpoint from my current business location, which is usually my home or my laptop if I'm traveling.

My customers are small organizations. Most of them have fewer than 100 employees. Very few of them qualify as medium organizations.

This solution made my time more effective. I don't spend as much time checking the viability of backups compared to other solutions. The solution saved us 30-40 minutes per day.

We haven't had customers calling about network slowdowns or experienced traffic from running a backup during business hours. The manageability of the product has been very helpful.

There's a turnaround time with a solution like this. It takes time to get familiar with it and install it. It took about a month to realize these benefits.

The single pane of glass gives me reporting and control over all of the agents with just one operation. This streamlining gave me more time for other tasks.

This solution allows us to save 10% of storage. It doesn't save us a huge amount of storage costs because the cost of storage is now reduced. It saves between $40-50 per month.

We sell services to other companies, and we also use Cove Data Protection in-house. We use it to back up servers and document files on workstations. It's mainly for servers and some workstations that are very busy, and we back up the documents folder.

We represent other companies. We provide IT services, so we sell services to other companies. The response from the other companies that we do the backups for is that they're very satisfied. It's complete satisfaction all the way around. There's not much we can complain about.

Cove Data Protection's cloud-first architecture gets the backups off of local networks and out of the reach of ransomware, which is very important because as we all know, we are all susceptible to ransomware attacks. Even though we have all the protection in place, such as firewalls, endpoint protection, and whatever else we can possibly think of, there's always the risk. If we get attacked locally, either on the workstation or server, we know that the cloud information should be intact so that we can bring it back any time we want. I say "should" because you never know.

It has grossly reduced the time or resources needed for administration. Previously, we were backing up more on local devices and into different data centers that we have or data centers of different clients. We were all using local devices to back up to little hard drives or tape drives, but it all required a lot of user intervention and a lot of people complained. Nobody wanted to do that anymore. Cove Data Protection has reduced a lot of time because nobody has to touch anything anymore. You just look at your email, and if the green light is on, it's fine. It's backed up. However, I wouldn't be able to tell if the freed resources were able to take on strategic projects or not. In most cases, they probably did have some other project going on because we do deal with a lot of different companies, but I don't know exactly how they distribute their resources. I would assume that they did. Less time is spent on the backups, and obviously, they can do other things with their time.

We are an MSP. Cove Data Protection has streamlined the way we handle data protection across all device types and customers. It gives us the ability to handle a much larger workload than we could have handled previously because it requires less intervention on our part or anybody's part. So, we have more of our internal resources available for our other clients or to bring on new clients, whereas, in the past, we couldn't do too much of that because the backups were handled internally and required too much user intervention, and of course, we would get a million calls, "How do you do this? How do I do that?" and so on and so forth. It has improved where that was the case.

This streamlining of data protection has affected the service levels that we are able to offer to our customers in a positive way. It gives us the ability to offer more services from the comfort of our office. People don't have to run after you and don't have to go looking for you. You're always at the same place, so it's very simple, very easy, and you can answer questions quicker. You can do your services quicker, and it's an all-around satisfaction.

Cove Data Protection uses less storage for a given number of restore points compared to traditional image backup products. It uses less. Their compression ratio is quite high, so the end result is that it seems to take a lot less space than the traditional backups we were using before. It has saved at least 20% of space.

The biggest saving is in the large data. We start to see the biggest savings with clients who have over 1 TB of data because internal backups or tape backups require a lot more resources than cloud backups. It depends on the amount of data you're trying to back up, but if somebody is backing up 500 GB of data or 200 GB of data, it's not much of a difference. When you start getting closer to a terabyte, that's when you start to see big savings.

We use Cove Data Protection for both storage and backup. This SaaS platform supports a variety of environments, enabling us to back up physical servers, virtual servers, as well as Windows, Linux, and macOS systems. Unlike Veeam, Cove allows us to back up physical servers seamlessly.

N-able Cove Data Protection is user-friendly and straightforward, with a clear dashboard that allows us to manage all our clients from a single interface, saving time and effort. Cove simplifies cloud storage protection, eliminating the need for local backup applications or storage solutions. Its unified dashboard lets us efficiently manage backups for servers, workstations, and Microsoft 365, offering greater flexibility.

For remote backup, Cove provides excellent flexibility with anytime access to the dashboard, enabling easy data restoration and backup management from anywhere. A standout feature is its built-in disaster recovery, included at no extra cost, along with automated cloud-based backup validation and testing.

I've always had a problem selling Backup Solutions to my client base. My clients, who are mostly in the nonprofit space, don't really see the value in paying for backup. It's been a hard sell, so trying to figure out the best way to market and sell backup has been a challenge. I tested out the solution to see if it would be a good fit for my clients.

I am an N-able partner. One of the bigger features and advantages of the solution is that it is easy to integrate with my RMM which is also N-able. 

My primary use case is for servers, user workstations, and Office 365 data. For the servers, I was looking for a solution that would allow me to do disaster recovery testing without a huge overhead in cost. This was the only solution I could find that worked really well and allowed me to use my own appliances to do disaster recovery testing. It also allows me to have an appliance either in my office or at the client site to actively restore the actual appliance.

I do multiple disaster recovery tests every quarter, and we do recovery tests on workstations every couple of weeks just to confirm the data is accessible. For all the workstations we manage, we try to add the backup solution to each computer. They have a file-based backup for important files, which is a really cheap alternative, and then they have a full image-based backup, SQL backup, Exchange backup, and full server backups. 

Primarily, we use it in small businesses that either have a server, use Office 365, or both. We use it pretty heavily. We're an MSP that utilizes this solution, and we also resell it to another vendor that does more of a break/fix style. They're not really an MSP, but I resell it to them as well. The rest of them are through packages from my clients.

The amount of time it takes for us to monitor and check the backup has decreased greatly. We're down to about 20 minutes of checks each day. We used to spend an average of three hours testing and troubleshooting problems, but now it's very rare that we actually run into problems.

We only have to go into one console, which is another huge benefit because my techs don't have to bounce around.

The other benefit is being able to provide a workstation backup for clients. Previously, it would get really expensive. A lot of the clients wouldn't even want to go with them. The big improvement is that we've been able to recover data for clients that aren't supposed to save locally, but they have. We're able to pull it back, and we look like the hero compared to in the past when we couldn't afford to put it on all the machines. Clients would get frustrated that they paid for backup on their server but didn't understand why they couldn't get the files they saved locally. We're now confident that we can protect all our data and devices at an extremely reasonable cost.

With Cove, I know that all their data is protected. I can set many different settings on different archiving levels, so I can have different compliancy in there. It saved us a lot because the cost is so effective that we can push it to all of our clients. We don't have to worry that we're going to ruin one of our relationships because a lot of people just don't understand how backup works and that it's not on everything. This really protected us and improved our relationships because we've recovered a lot of data for people. Whereas in the past, we wouldn't have had a backup on it.

Disaster recovery is another benefit because it's so reliable. We're able to constantly test and run disaster recovery testing on some servers. We do it to our location nightly. With that option, we've been able to deploy servers when one of our clients has failed and had them up and running within a few hours. Previously, we could never get a solid solution, so we typically had to just download the data and start from scratch, which always took us a few days. 

Our clients are really impressed and thankful that they're able to get their data back or their server up and running so much faster than before. It previously cost us a lot of money because it took a lot of time. There was also a lot of frustration on the client's side because being down for a couple of days is not good for me or them.

The ability to back up, restore, and do different types of testing for preventative maintenance really increased our importance to these clients because they see the value in how fast we can get them back up and running. We're saving them money in that way.

It provides a cloud-based backup service for my clients' PCs and servers

I don't know if the solution has necessarily improved my customers' organizations, but there is satisfaction in knowing that their data is on a cloud-based service. It's very important that, in case of a disaster, such as ransomware, a hardware loss, or something physically happening to the equipment, the data is available to us via another source that is off the network.

Cove Data Protection has streamlined how we handle data protection, as an MSP. It saves me time by having only one console to administrate all the backups for my clientele. It has dramatically affected the service levels I'm able to offer customers. It provides a comfort level for me as a service provider, and I carry that confidence over to my clients when reselling the product, knowing that it's a trustworthy service and company.