N-able Cove Data Protection Reviews

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.

The cloud-based data protection we get from the solution is huge because we've transformed almost all of our clients to 365. Prior to this, we tried a few different backups and had multiple backups for different items. Now, I can go into one dashboard and have direct access to the 365 data. It's extremely easy to set up and monitor. It's extremely easy to deploy no matter where the device is or if it's a 365 account or machine.

The vendor has 30-day centers worldwide to help keep backups in the regions where they need them. That's really big because one of the issues I had with a previous vendor was that their backup site either had a couple of locations or it was just really far from my location. The latency seemed really poor, and a lot of backups were failing. With this solution, I can put data near almost any client and have reliable bandwidth there, which is really important to me.

The solution streamlined the way we handle data protection across all device types and customers. We're able to deploy an agent through our RMM with the scripting we're able to do and without going onto the machine. Then we're able to apply different packages right away. I can even have the admin deploy backup to computers. I don't even need to have a technician do it. The ability to pull off technicians from doing basic installations is huge. We're now able to automate most of it, and admins can do the rest of it, so I don't have to pay a technician just to do installations.

On the restore side, it's streamlined a lot and improved the service levels we offer because we're able to recover so quickly. Typically, a technician could be restoring something for about 30 minutes. Now, we're able to restore what the client needs, and the ticket is closed within 10 minutes. Our turnaround time was cut in half. The reports are also streamlined. Overall, our clients can tell that it's streamlined because of how quickly we're able to recover and give them feedback reports. It's really stopped a lot of questions coming in because we're able to give them reports that show that the backup is continuously working. Whereas before, we would have to give a lot of explanations on why backups failed on certain days and what was going on.

An image-based backup is good for clients who might be closer to a certain data center. However, I had so many issues. For example, I couldn't even restore the image, so I had to just pull the data file. The product worked maybe 30% of the time when I did an image restore. 

With Cove, it's at least 90% or higher. I just restore it and it works. Sometimes I have to tweak it, and that's just from putting on different hardware, but with the image-based backup, I've done servers, workstations, and many different types of machines, and it has at least a high 90% reliability on the image side. That is huge because it saves so much time to restore an image rather than trying to re-download all the software, install and get all the data back. The image is incredible.

For the MSP side, they could have more of a "security user" that can go in and only see certain clients. If you give somebody access as a technician, they can see all the clients. There are other minor things, like GUI or other user permissions that would be nice to have on some level, but there's nothing I would drastically change to the product because it works so well. It's rare for me to not want a lot of improvements, but when something works this well, I wouldn't want any major changes.

I've been using this solution for over two years.

I haven't had any issues with stability. There have been times when a backup has failed and there have been different reasons why I've needed to contact support, but it's always been a user computer issue where the hard drive died and there's data corruption. From the standpoint of the actual program working, my confidence is high because I haven't had any issues that weren't easily identifiable and then resolved.

I'm a smaller business, but I've used this solution on multi-site servers, which I have to be able to recover quickly. The scalability is pretty big. There are a lot of different aspects that you can use with their product to go from a small client up to dozens of servers for another client. They have many different options for different features you're going to need for your servers. As technology grows, they come out with newer features. 

Right now, I feel like I can stay with this product for a very long time because I'm able to go from one server up to dozens of servers, and I know I can be confident in this one solution. From my standpoint, their scalability is really good.

Cove offers an office training day, and you can see their different backup products. You get access to their support and different engineers. Everyone I've talked to there is extremely supportive, even though I'm a smaller company.

With other vendors, it seemed like because I was smaller, I didn't get any real support and my items were dropped. My clients are extremely important to me, so it was frustrating to not have a vendor that I could trust and feel like they backed me up. 

Since I've switched to Cove, I feel extremely confident in knowing I can restore a backup and contact support if I have any complications because they've always been there when I needed them.

Positive

I've used Acronis Backup. One of the biggest reasons I switched was the reliability of the product, and the second was the pricing. It was hard to understand what I was being billed for. The technicians enabled different features that the client wasn't paying for, and we were getting billed for it. We weren't able to provide a lot of solutions for smaller clients because of the price of the cloud and the local data we were getting billed for. 

I also had a hard time with support. It would often take hours to get any type of response. It felt like we weren't big enough to get a response back in a meaningful amount of time. With Cove's support, I get a response within a very reasonable amount of time.

I've used other solutions like Code42 Backup. None of them seem to have everything accessible, especially for local data restoration. Acronis didn't have an easy way to do disaster recovery locally and have it continually work well. I had a few instances where recovering data took three to four days for a very small amount.

Cove is extremely clear with its pricing. I've never had any issues with that. They give me all the types of backup I would need in one platform, so I'm able to quickly set up a server backup and disaster recovery. I've already restored dozens of machines. I've also restored servers within 24 hours with a lot of data and had zero issues. With Acronis, I typically would have to start two or three times to get it to work, and a lot of times it just wouldn't start. It would take days to download 200 gigs of data.

I'm allowed to use any appliance, and I can spec it up the way I want. You can get their appliance, and the pricing scales significantly. I had a lot of issues with their workstation backups and disaster recovery. They were more interested in you buying their appliance. It would work well, but then you would be trapped in their pricing scheme. 

With Cove, the sales people I've worked with down to all the technicians are there for you. You don't feel like you're sold a product and then get dropped.

The initial setup is extremely straightforward. I onboarded and was able to deploy the machines right away. They make it very easy to understand how the different areas work. I was able to create the different packages I wanted and just deploy them. You don't need a lot of training to understand it.

Other products were similar, but a lot of them have many different areas and there are add-on packages that aren't listed as add-ons. You think you can just put them into the package and you won't be billed. There were a lot of add-ons that weren't included and many extra steps just to deploy an agent. I'm able to automatically deploy Cove to a new machine with almost no interaction.

I've always had to do extra steps just to get other appliances to work, and I've always had to work with support a few times to fully understand their process and the correct best practices of using different packages and creating them. Cove was direct about implementation and was easy to start using.

Most of my clients are probably saving at least a few thousand dollars a year on average in support and maintenance. That's from having already had a backup and recovery solution. A lot of it was the downtime and the time to get them back up and running due to the complications of the old backup vendors.

There was also a reduction in time spent on the resources needed for administration. Right now, we only have one person who checks the backups each day. Previously, I would usually have two different guys check different backup vendors we used, and sometimes I would have to help in the mornings because it would take three hours to get through each task. 

We've seen a reduction in time spent because the backups are going through, and there are a lot of different scripts you can put in to automate certain functionalities, which wasn't possible with other vendors. A lot of times, I was stuck trying to get the backups up and running every day for different clients, which was killing our productivity. Now, I'm able to have one primary person who checks it. 

We have a lot of other features that come in with the emails and different scripts we run. But having just one person I can rely on has saved us so much time and frustration because the product just works. We don't have to constantly try to fix it. Our energy goes toward other necessities. 

Storage-wise, Cove Data Protection saved us thousands and thousands of dollars because we're able to do all the disaster recovery in-house, and they have a very reasonable cost for in-cloud testing. With other vendors, the cloud cost would be continuously higher.

Cove only takes the data you have on the physical server. I can back that up for long periods of time, and I don't accrue high charges to have the data in the cloud. It stays at one rate. This allows me to forecast payment for the next one or two years and show clients their estimated growth. Previously, I had to try to calculate the data sets and how often we were saving, and then try to clean up the data.

There were a lot of issues because sometimes we were getting charged for archive data. It started to become a mess because the pricing would usually exceed what the client was paying with other vendors, so I was constantly trying to catch up to get the correct amount billed and recoup the money back. Now, we're able to offer an extremely well-priced solution to our clients that is thousands of dollars less than any of the competitors I've used.

I would rate this solution ten out of ten.

For someone who says that image-based backup is the only way to go, I would say that in today's world, with all the different types of hacks you could have, ransomware, and different data corruptions, it's important to be able to back up to multiple servers and physical devices, and to have another copy saved to a hard drive and one in the cloud. 

Let's say you have one image backup and that's it. If that becomes corrupted or ransomed and it's encrypted and locked out, it's really dangerous to have just one type of backup. We have multiple sets that do backups to different locations and different devices. I've had some clients that only have one type of backup and to dial that backup can be really scary because if it doesn't work when you go to restore it, you're in a lot of trouble. 

It's really nice to be able to recover files when needed, especially if there is ransomware or you suspect any type of infiltration. You can get the files back and then scan them. To me, you need to have multiple layers of backup to really feel secure. Only having one type of backup is extremely risky.

For almost all my customers, critical data is what we're backing up and that's a total of something like 20 terabytes in total. It's nothing, however, it's a lot more than I would want to have to recreate in terms of data. We had our own in-house solution previous to that, and we abandoned it for something more robust. We have everything from lawyers, and doctors to auto repair shops, and investment or real estate management companies on the solution, and it works well for all of them. 

We only backup data. We don't ever anticipate doing a bare-metal restore. Usually, if a server blows a raid card or motherboard, bare metal is not going to help us on it; it's not going to save us anything. We could more easily generate up an operating system on a new box. We're not a Fortune 500 provider that might have to have spare machines lying around. 

There's no special hardware, although they're all migrated to the cloud now, however, the net-net of it is our idea with getting things back up and rocking again, are by using things that are common.

We keep all the customer data current. We can rebuild a server in a heartbeat. We don't need to be able to come back in 10 minutes. If we did, there would be a virtual situation, and it would be on a virtual server.

A bunch of my customers had been ransomwared and we used this product to successfully recover items.

The solution is good at verifying proof of backup. For example, a customer might say "I've deleted this file. I need yesterday's version for me, please put it back in the same place" and we can do so.

It used to take a couple of hours to turn up a new client with our previous product and now, I could do it and I could have the instance ready and everything rocking in probably 15 minutes. It's fast.

Most of that's just backroom billing information. That I can reconcile properly. Our system, our previous system, was pretty flexible, however, it was manual mode and restoring was an absolute disaster on our old system. This stuff on this is child's play.

The backup times are also reduced. Although our backup previously compressed like this solution's, and it reviewed, it didn't send over stuff that it didn't need to send over. It operated pretty efficiently. We ran our operation on 150 megabits per second pipe without ever stressing it previously. The only nice thing about the old way was if I got a complete failure and I needed to dump a drive, I could. I could have it restored at LAN speed, gigabits per second. Whereas now, we have to download it, and that could be a couple of hours. However, usually we'll kick off the download while we're rebuilding the server. That way, by the time we're all done, we're ready to rock and roll.

The solution has also reduced the amount of time that we spend on backup administration. While previously, we were looking at about an hour or more a day, now, it's maybe 15 minutes. It's gotten much faster and we are saving a lot of time.

I'm able to benefit from the backup-related costs. I haven't changed what I am charging customers, however, my costs have become external, and in that sense, I have given myself a raise.

Overall, our team is much more satisfied. I don't have to bite my fingernails every morning wondering "What happened here?" Pretty much when things don't back up, it's usually either a machine failure or their network went down or something else is screwed up. For example, maybe somebody decided to reboot something on me and didn't let me know about it. In one case, somebody was actively getting hacked, and we noticed that and we were able to shut everything down before life totally went to pieces, and we had them back up and rocking the next day. It happened at four or five o'clock on one day, and we had them bright and early in the morning back and operational again.

The fact that I have a single pane of glass that I can look at in the morning and I can look at 80 plus instances in, probably more than 80 now, in under five minutes, I can verify that everything's current, that's a great advantage. If it isn't current, I can understand in a second why it's not current and dispatch out, either tickets to my guys to fix something or an email to a customer to please give us access to a couple of servers that we don't have access to.

There is a very, very small learning curve. It's kind of like getting a new car. Once you get the muscle memory going, its piece of cake. It was just a couple of things that switching over from our in-house product to their product took a little bit of getting used to, however, it was pretty simple. I asked a bunch of questions like, Hey, what do I do for this? How do I find this out or that out? And then, we were good to go.

It's their cloud, it's their storage. I don't have to buy a space on Amazon or Google's cloud and then use their software to push it. That works well for me. This way, I don't have to worry about another option or the opportunity that there might be a credential leak.

I know on the backup side it runs extremely well. The recovery side, the restore side, could be a little more optimized, however, the amount of time that we spend in restore mode is maybe a couple of weeks out of five years. On the other hand, backups happen every night. They happen all the time. We get a new customer, we have to onboard them, and they give us a couple of options for onboarding and all of them are excellent. That said, in most cases, we're not onboarding a terabyte right out of the get-go.

Currently you can't dump the files that were backed up. You have to use the web interface and you can only see 30 files at a crack. If I'm looking for a particular file, it would be easier for me just to dump down the catalogs and suck them into a spreadsheet and do my cut and slice in that way. I'd be able to figure out "Oh, this file changed on this day. Therefore, I want this version." This is critical, as the customer is not only telling me, they're going to tell me Mary Sue left on the 12th and the last day was the day she broke it, or Mary Sue was working on that before she left and I'm not sure when she last made the change. I can't pin it to any particular day which means I either have to sift through it from the web interface or I have to reload. That means I will have to download one or more files manually and then compare them that way. If I could get the catalogs dropped to me in a CSV format, that would be very, very helpful. As it is now, it's not only cumbersome, it's also a slow drawn-out process.

I've been using the solution for about five years or so at this point.

There was only one day that I couldn't do backups due to the fact that they had a node failure. I thought that maybe this was a bad omen of things to come, however, now, if I look back, one day out of five years is a pretty good run. I'm happy with the stability on offer. It's reliable.

We've grown from, when we started, around seven terabytes or six terabytes. We've grown to almost 20 now. Not a single time did I get a note from them saying, "Hey, you have to do something to have more data." Nothing like that. We've added customers and taken away customers. Occasionally we have customers quit, or retire old servers, or somebody got his own local backup machine. It's scaled with every change.

Every customer that we bring onboard for our other consulting work, I tell them about what are we doing for offsite backups. They'll say something like, "Oh yeah, I just put it up on my OneDrive or my Google cloud". I warn them that they don't back anything up for you. I'll ask "What do you do when such and such happens?" Sure enough, they become a backup customer. We sell it with everything that we do, however, we're an easy-going kind of company. They say, "Oh, no. I don't want to pay for that. I'd rather just go with my OneDrive." We won't pressure them. We'll just say "Knock yourself out. You can always start going with us after your situation, or if your solution doesn't work. I won't say I told you so. Promise." Then they'd look at me and say, "Okay. It's not that much. Go ahead and throw it on." I'm glad when they don't nickel and dime themselves. In any case, as we add, the solution accommodates. We never have to worry about having space for one more client.

The tech support group is spot on. I ended up just emailing the head person and saying, "how is this supposed to work?" And he emailed me back with the directions to find exactly what I needed.  

I don't need a whole lot of support, however, when I do, I just send them an email and they respond back to me. I remember one time I was told, "Please open a ticket for this". And my next question was, "How do I do tickets?" And they realized that I don't take a lot of hands. I don't need a lot of handholding.

I'm quite satisfied with their level of service. They're great.

We previously used an in-house homemade solution with a couple of other things cobbled together to make it work.

We had to level up to something better. I couldn't grow it for our customer base. It was okay. It worked fine and I could grow a little bit, however, then I would have to get more hardware and I just thought I was managing it is more than I really wanted to. I don't want to run a server farm. Therefore, I pressed the change and I did a little cost analysis and found their software was way more flexible and the restorer was painless compared to ours. 

The initial setup is extremely straightforward. I was up and running in an hour.

I knew what is going to be backed up due to the fact that we had our in-house system. I used the information about what was being backed up on the server. I already had lists of servers and IP addresses, et cetera. I wasn't reinventing the wheel from scratch.

For maintenance, it's just me. There are five of us in the company, however, I take care of it personally, myself. It's maybe a 15-minute job. It's one of the first things I do when I sit down at my desk.

I did not work with any third-party integrator or consultants for the deployment.

My salesperson basically walked me through it. Once I got a couple of our servers going, I then added one of my customer's servers and he showed me how to keep things separated. That way, in reporting, I'd be able to easily manage it. The deployment probably wasn't even an hour. It's way easier than how we used to do it previously.

The ROI is pretty good. It allows us to respond quickly. We were able to respond to a customer's requests, for example, whether it is for a ransomware attack that we recovered them from, or if an employee accidentally erases a whole bunch of sub-directories and they need to be recovered. Any time a customer is satisfied with how things turn out,I consider that as a return on investment.

In terms of metrics, if I look at what my profitability is, that has a good return on investment in general, however, I've never sat down and said, "Okay, so my old system costs me X dollars a gigabyte. This cost me X minus 20 cents a gigabyte. Okay. I'm making more money on it." I'm not that much of a bean counter. I look at the end of the month and say, "Hey, there's money in the checkbook. This is a good month." I'm a computer guy. I'm not an accountant.

If I would have to estimate, I'd say that the Return on Investment is almost 100% due to the fact that you only pay for what you use. It's kind of like using virtual machines. There is no upfront cost, at least not with my contract. I don't know what everybody else's contracts look like. Maybe I got a good deal. Maybe I negotiated well. 

The terms for their contract, they were pretty loose in that. They allowed us to give it a try for a couple months. If we didn't like it, they'd let us out. If I recall correctly, the first term was one year. That meant my maximum exposure was pretty limited.

They did change their billing method or their computation method at one point. They might not have adequately gotten everybody on board as to how that was changing, and it upped the bills a bit. We didn't understand the billing computation. It had to do with high watermarks as opposed to just purely what it was on the last day of the month. We've since sorted out the confusion.

There is no per node cost, at least not the way I am doing it. I am on bulk. New customers can be set up on a trial, where they can get things all squared away, then they can switch over to being a billed customer.

At the end of the day, there aren't any costs in addition to their standard licensing fees.

We did evaluate some other options, however, we landed on this product mostly due to the pricing. We found it would be more consistent, billing-wise, and that was a huge selling point. 

We are just a customer and an end-user.

We use a variety of different versions, including 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, and all the way back to 20.10.  

We do not use its automated recovery testing. I do it manually. I know there is an automated feature, however, I don't want to use it. I prefer keeping everything inside my own box. I want to maintain all my keys. Therefore, I test the keys myself, to make sure that the files are recoverable.

I would advise those considering the solution to look at the total cost of ownership. That would be my big takeaway from this. It's just not the amount of money that you're spending on your bill today, but what are you getting out of it down the road. There may be intangibles that you haven't factored into it yet. Whether it's archives are included in the costs or the fact that I have tech support people that are available to help me manage my platform so that I pay the least amount of money on it. If there's optimization that needs to happen and they'll help me with it, that's great. It all factors in. You need to measure it in its totality. 

On a scale from one to ten, one being the worst and 10 being the best, I would rate the solution at a ten.

It has all the notifications, all the bells, and whistles. I could sit down and look at the pane of glass or I can have it send me 5,000 emails a day if that's what I prefer. It's flexible, whichever way you want to go. I particularly don't want a whole bunch of emails. I want to be able to sit down and look at things myself and analyze them myself. It makes it easier to find the needle in the haystack - and I'm happy that it gives me the option.

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.

What I like the most about it's the ease of use and the reliability that it has when copying information to the cloud. It seems to be very efficient. We tried some sample restores. It was very easy to use either to restore to the original location or to a different location. We didn't have any issues with it. So, overall, we are satisfied with it.

It provides cloud-based data protection that includes backup, disaster recovery, and archiving. It's very important that it has all those features. In today's world, the reliability of the actual backups is a must. It's important that the backup doesn't keep having issues and that it's able to synchronize everything on the cloud. It's also very useful when it does a restore. It's very efficient. It has a very simple and easy-to-use design and web interface.

They have been improving their interface and adding new things to it. Based on what we were using before, what we're using now is very advanced. It's a regular backup and restore solution. Everything I needed up till now is there. It's very easy to use. It's quite straightforward so far. I haven't run into any roadblocks, and I was able to do whatever had to be done.

We've done only partial recovery to see if it's okay and whatever we had to do looked fine. The only thing that would be good, but I'm not sure if they already have, is that in the event of a disaster, the recovery process could be a little bit longer if I have to recover 2, 3, or 4 TB of data. It could take 2 or 3 days to recover that kind of data. It would be good if they could offer a service where I can say, "This is my server, and I have to recover all the data from this drive." They can have a service where they put everything on an external hard drive and ship it to you overnight for you to restore quickly. That's the only thing that would be useful. For small amounts of data, recovery is easy, but when it's large amounts of data, it takes forever. So, if they can have a service where they put our data on a hard drive and ship it to us as fast as possible, it would be great. Even if there's a fee associated with it, it's fine. Everybody would be willing to pay that just to increase the speed of a large recovery. If you've got to recover 5, 6, 10, 20, or 100 GB of data, you don't need that, but for large amounts of data, it would be important to have that type of service.

We have been using this solution for about one year.

So far, it seems very stable. When we were using Datto, it was a little bit rocky, but Cove Data Protection is surprisingly stable. 

Its scalability has been very good so far. We haven't had any roadblocks. We mainly have the Windows environment. For the Windows environment, so far, it has been good. Both 365 backups and server backups seem to be okay.

It's all Windows environment. All the departments are using it, and we're also using part of it for the Office 365 backup. If we go to the cloud for a company, we try to do everything in the cloud.

So far, I haven't contacted them. I only used their knowledge base at the beginning when we first started using it about a year ago. I found all the answers. When you're first deploying it, there are always questions like:

• How do I do this?
• How do I do that?
• How do I restore? 

It was all well explained. Their document library is pretty good.

For cloud storage, we were using Datto Cloud, and our internal backups were mainly on tape or hard disk. 

Datto Cloud was okay, but we had a lot of issues synchronizing to the cloud on certain systems and we don't know why. When moving to Cove Data Protection, we went on a trial basis at the beginning to make sure that we didn't have the same issues, and we did not. So, for us, it was very important that the communication between our location and the cloud is done in a very efficient manner, and it's not going to break down all the time. That's what gave us the go-ahead to move from Datto to Cove Data Protection. Having an interface that is very friendly and easy to use was also a big plus.

When deciding to go with this solution, it was important that the vendor has 30 data centers worldwide to help keep backups in the regions where you need them. Unfortunately, you always have to keep in mind that although we're backed up to the ground, we don't know where it's going. We don't know the exact location. The fact that they have many locations is important because I assume that they mirror from one place to another and so on and so forth, so the more locations they have, the better it is.

It's a cloud deployment. The initial setup is straightforward. It takes me 15 minutes. You create the account, download, and select whatever folders you want or the whole machine. At most, it takes you 30 minutes per server, and it's done, but that's a one-time setup. If the client already existed, you just add another machine to it in 15 minutes, and it's done.

It's all done in-house. I do it all myself. 

In terms of maintenance, up till now, it doesn't require any maintenance. I get a notification every week of all the backups it's doing, and it's all green. There isn't much for us to do. 

We have seen an ROI. Cloud backup is a continuous revenue stream that we didn't have before. Because we did the backups internally, once you've bought the equipment and everything else, nobody hears about it anymore, and it's not making revenue anymore, whereas when we're using a cloud stream like Cove Data Protection, for us, the return is good. It's much higher. Also, if the clients do require a restore and we do the restoring service for them, obviously, there's a higher rate of return because you can do it from your own desk. You don't have to go onsite. If you go by the time that is spent, it's 100% in your pocket. There's no cost, so the rate of return is quite good. For every dollar we spent, we got 50% back, so it's pretty good.

The pricing, for now, is good. The package that they gave us recently is pretty good. It depends on how many clients you have, and you pay for certain terabytes per license. These terabytes, if not used, are pooled together. So, one client may have exhausted their limit but the other ones might not have, but because they're all in the same pool, we're able to share the total amount of space, which is pretty good. The pricing is pretty good for us. It's doing what it's supposed to do.

We were approached by Arcserve, but Cove Data Protection gave us a better interface and better reliability.

I would rate Cove Data Protection a nine out of ten because nothing is perfect. The only reason why I wouldn't give it a ten is that I haven't yet gone through a full disaster recovery from them. Everything so far is A+. We did a few restores just to test them out, and it did okay, but we wouldn't know until we do a full-scale restore on someone. Another thing with Cove Data Protection is that when you're in the cloud and when you're talking about large amounts of data, it takes time. It can take over a day or two days to restore data. It's not done within an hour. That's the only reason why I wouldn't give it a ten.

There are a lot of backup solutions out there, including cloud backup solutions. We wanted one that was reliable, had a good name, and obviously was easy to deploy, manage and monitor. We checked all of those boxes with the Cove.

The one thing that really drew us to it, is the ability to launch any failed backups remotely without having to remote into the person's computer or server. We can do all of that through the console and just kick off backups that may have failed for one reason or another.

We've got twenty-seven different clients right now using Cove and our success rate on backups, taking out all the variables like computers being offline or crashing, is about a 95% to 99% success rate at all times. 

It's a very reliable product. Dovetailing with that, being able to tell our clients that their backups are working every day ensures that they don't have to worry about monitoring them anymore or letting us monitor them. We are no longer constantly letting them know, "Hey, your backups failed again and again, and again." It builds our reputation.

The most valuable feature is how well it backs up and restores. The ease of use and the console are great. That is one of the most sought-after features we were looking for - to be able to do all that remotely without having to interrupt the user.

It's pretty important to us that the solution provides cloud-based data protection that includes backup disaster recovery and archiving. Most of our clients will back up flat files without having to do full system backups, however, we do full system backups just to make sure we catch everything. In full transparency, we have not had to do a full system restore. I can't testify to how that works, however, restoring flat files, works well.

It was very important to have thirty data centers worldwide to help keep backups in the regions where we needed them since our clients ask us about redundancy all the time. We care about it too. The security of the data centers and the number of data centers and redundancy are very important to us. This delivers in that sense.

We realized the benefits of the solution right after the first full backup. It gave us an idea of how long it takes and allowed us to test for stores and performance, within a matter of a couple of days. We could see that it was working. Of course, we wanted to be a little guarded and give it a week or a couple of weeks, or a month to make sure. However, after a couple of days, we were comfortable with it.

It was important for us that the solution's cloud-first architecture gets our backups off of local networks and out of the reach of ransomware. If it's air-gapped, it’s ideal. If the local site got hit by a ransomware attack, at least there's something offsite that has not been affected, which is critical.

When it comes to delivering data protection, the solution has reduced the time or resources needed for administration. Just to have the data backed up and then having an easy-to-use console portal to restore data has reduced them significantly. It’s probably a few hours a month. In terms of human resources, we’re not necessarily saving on resources, rather, we’re able to be more efficient with the resources we have, so we can do more with the same amount of people.

We are an MSP. We're standardized on Cove and all our new clients get that as their backup, and, in some cases, server backup solutions.

With streamlining, we can use our remote monitoring management tool, to push it out and everything's automated. Tying that in with our ticketing system, we can tell when the backups failed, which makes everything extremely efficient.

The product does seem to be quite efficient in data storage. I'm really surprised how small the data sets are to back up the entire machine. We are saving, considering if we do full image-based backups, anywhere from, I'd say 30% to 60%.

We save on storage costs. We get a healthy allotment from N-Able to back up, however, there are real limits that we have to match or stay under and we haven't crossed those yet.

The efficiency of the solution's architecture to other image-based backups seems pretty intuitive from just the handful I've tested out before. It's all web-based, which is really nice. I don't have to download any products or applications. It just seems like they do a pretty good job with efficiency.

We're really pretty impressed and happy with the product. In full disclosure, we're also a Datto reseller. There is an area of improvement that has to do with a Datto comparison. We do have Datto as our backup and disaster recovery for servers. If we wanted to move Cove into the server arena, having a way to spin up the restores in the cloud, as opposed to having to download them first to some local storage and spinning things up and testing them out would be better. The Datto solution, for example, has got everything in the cloud. You can spin up, you can test servers, restores, and more, all outside of the network. Whereas with Cove, while we haven't done a full restore yet, from what I can tell, we cannot test restores without downloading the backup image from the cloud. Therefore, a disaster recovery console would be an improvement for the product.

I've used the solution for at least three or four years. I used it back when it was SolarWinds. It then became N-Able and now it's Cove Data Protection.

What we're really impressed with is the performance. We tried another backup solution from Datto. They're a cloud backup for the desktops and it's very resource-intensive. The one thing we like about the Cove product is that the users really can't tell that their systems are being backed up, as far as feeling any sense of slowness or any performance decrease on their computers.

It seems to scale pretty well. 

I'm trying to think of when I talked to somebody. If I did, it was a long time ago. I haven't needed technical support.

We did not have a different solution beforehand. The clients that we've inherited or got over the years, had a smattering of different types of backups. Most, back in the day, were tape-based backups and we tried to push everyone in the cloud to get it offsite. We've seen a whole gamut of different types of backups. We didn't have a particular solution when we first started. We did some research and that's when we landed on the N-Able, now Cove.

Starting up and creating a new customer is pretty easy. It's pretty straightforward to go through and create the customer. From there, you're through it in two or three steps. It will ask things like: "do you want to back up Office 365 and SharePoint" or "do you want to back up a local machine", and whether it is a desktop or server.

There are policies you can apply to it. We have preset policies. They really don't take long to set up initially. We set the policy and then build the installer. Each installer is unique to that client. We take that installer and then if they have a server, we decide if we want to push down with what they call a group policy, a GPO.

We can manually run it, we can push it through an RMM tool. There are a lot of different ways we can deploy it. Another really nice element is it's a silent installer by default. We run it and the client doesn't even know it's being run. They can still be working on their machine, working away happily and they don't even know if the software is getting installed. Then, suddenly, it's just on their computer and it starts backing up. It's really a very svelte way of installing and getting back up installed on a machine.

There's no general maintenance needed at all. Most of our clients are managed. If they need something restored, they'll just put a ticket in or give us a call and say, "Hey, we need something restored, that's been on the backup." We'll go back and we'll ask them how far back they want to go. There are snapshots. It takes three backups a day if I'm not mistaken, we go in there and pick a day and the time. Then, we can restore it back to its original location or to an alternate location and away we go.

While I would always love it to be cheaper, it's probably on par with the middle of the pack, especially given the features it has. It's right in the middle of the market, cost-wise.

I was part of the process in terms of choosing the solution in the beginning. When deciding to go with the solution, it was important that it included cloud storage as part of the package. We didn't want to provision any storage on our end, either locally or through Azure or AWS. As long as it had its own storage, we wanted to look at it as it just made things a lot simpler.

iDrive was one of the solutions we looked at. We fiddled with it a little bit, however, it was more consumer-based. It didn't provide enough features and monitoring and it just wasn't a mature business product.

We're consultants. We also have a reseller agreement with Cove as well. On top of that, we also use the solution ourselves. All the products we resell, we use as well.

In terms of using an image-based backup, I would say we’re going to store a lot more data doing an image-based backup, however, it'll catch everything. The problem we've had in the past, seeing other colleagues' backups, and then being unable to restore certain pieces, is due to the fact that they're only backing up the user's profile, documents, downloads, music, pictures, et cetera, as opposed to backing up an entire machine. Google, for example, stores its Chrome bookmarks in a nonstandard location. If we don't know where that is, the chances are they're not going to get backed up and not get restored. However, an image-based backup will catch everything on the machine.

I would give them a good solid nine out of ten. The only reason I wouldn't give them a ten out of ten is we aren't able to restore in the cloud and test everything out as we can on Datto, without having to download the full image onto bare metal hardware.

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.

The user interface is the most valuable. It gives us the ability to check everything. With more than 100 endpoints running that software, I like the ability to quickly check that everything is working correctly. That's one of the biggest selling points.

I've been able to recover everything that I've tried to recover.

It's important to me that the solution provides cloud-based data protection that includes backup, disaster recovery, and archiving because that's the only reason I use it. It gives our clients an offsite backup solution that's basically automated and that we don't have to worry about, or we're at least able to easily monitor its success.

Cloud storage is important to us because it gives us the ability to wrap everything into one package and not have to worry about a secondary source for cloud storage. It's much easier this way.

We're fairly local, but the fact that the vendors have 30 data centers worldwide is good for redundancy.

Compared to other solutions, the efficiency of Cove's architecture for image-based backups is as good as any. The recovery and speed are as good as any solution that we've had experience with.

I have some issues with the agent failing on workstations. I've had to completely uninstall several of them, delete everything, and start over to get them to work. That's been the biggest source of my problems recently. The problem is that when we delete one, we lose the backup. Consequently, it means we're without a backup unless we have a local copy. When we delete the agent, there's the problem of how to go back and restore it. I haven't had to deal with it yet, because I haven't had a failure that occurred while I was doing that.

I had a workstation that started failing, and we couldn't get the services to run. I don't know what caused it. I had to reinstall the agent, which didn't work. I had to go into the machine and delete everything and load another agent onto it. Once I did that, I was able to make it work, but 90% of the time I never have an issue. During the other 10% of the time when I have a problem, it's a mess. The ability to recover to a different workstation or a different data point is a little bit clumsy. It could use some work.

I have been using this solution for two years.

I would give the stability a nine out of ten. The only reason it's not a ten is because of the agent failures.

It's absolutely scalable.

I would rate technical support an eight out of ten. It's satisfactory.

Positive

We previously used Acronis. We switched because we spent a lot of time trying to manage the Acronis backups. There were some agent issues with it as well, just like with Cove. The only thing about the Acronis backups that I liked better than Cove was that we had the option of having our backup go local first. 

In fact, we could even set it so that our backup was local only. There was a small fee charged for the licensing of the software. If a customer didn't want to pay for cloud backup and just wanted to have a local copy, I could use their software to do that. Acronis gives me that option, which Cove doesn't.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It takes one month to deploy 400 endpoints.

Our strategy was to set up the customers, and then download and install the agents. Once we do that, we can configure if each one has specifics about it that we have to configure, or if we need to configure it in groups. We can give them what they want.

It only takes one person to deploy the solution. 

The solution only requires maintenance in regard to agent failures. Our customers do their own maintenance. The only problem is when the agents go offline.

We have seen a 30% ROI. I'm not a loss leader person, so if I'm not making a return on a solution, I quit using it because I don't see what the point is. We definitely make money on it. If I had to charge more, I'd probably lose some customers. 

In that regard, it's at a price point where I can keep some customers, and the only reason it makes sense is that I don't have to spend a lot of my time managing it.

The price isn't extreme, but I'd love to pay less.

We looked at a couple of other solutions, but most of them were appliance based. We actually needed to have an appliance put in to do the backups. We have a couple of clients who are on appliance backups, but that's the exception and not the rule for the most part. A lot of our clients are smaller, so for them to go the route of an appliance-based backup just doesn't make economic sense.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

There are a few things that would make the solution a lot better. There are some issues with the agents going offline, which might be fixable. I haven't really pursued that with their technical support because I don't have time. It's just easier for me to dump it and reinstall it. I would love to get it fixed so I don't have to do that. On the other hand, I can't figure out why this keeps happening to various machines.

My advice is that whether or not you have a targeted machine or server, you need to make up your mind as to what happens the morning you walk in and it won't turn on. Do you need to bring back a bunch of files, or do you need a machine that will boot up and work as that one did? That's what tells me whether or not someone needs a full image backup or if they just want a file and folder. If it's somebody who doesn't think they need to back up a workstation, then I challenge them to turn off that computer and go about their day and see what happens. Most of them change their mind.

To a colleague who says that image-based backup is the only way to go, I would say that if you don't have some kind of image-based backup of a business critical machine, you're making a huge mistake.

A positive of the cloud-first architecture is that we have a backup in the cloud. The negative is that the initial backup can sometimes take forever. I have dealt with a less-than-perfect Internet connection, so I've had backups run for days before we had the first full backup in the cloud. If we had been able to get one locally, then at least we would've had a backup. It depends on the situation, but in a 50/50 scenario, it's great that it gets to the cloud first, but it's a problem if some clients don't have the best Internet connections because I'm not able to get a backup for days unless I do a seeding, which is a hassle.

When it comes to delivering data protection, the solution hasn't had a big impact on reducing our resources. However, it has been a big time-saver.

Compared to previous solutions, Cove is equally as efficient, if not more, when it comes to restoring points.

We use it for backup of our remote workstations.

Cove Data Protection has given us a fresh start in data backups. One of the problems we ran into was that the previous tool we were using wasn't really built for a large environment. It also didn't have the visibility we needed to administer it properly. Now, I can sit down and look at the Cove dashboard and I know what's going on in my environment. I know who's backed up recently, who hasn't, who's still here, who isn't. It's one pane of glass for me to run to and look at.

It has also made administration much easier. Our company didn't really administer the previous solution and that's one of the reasons it was such a mess. But because this solution is so simple to look at and know what's going on, I'm able to take about three hours out of a day, one day a week, and take care of my entire environment. It has given us the tools we needed to improve on what we were doing, so that we can actually administer it and take care of it.

All its features are valuable. Perhaps the biggest value we've gotten out of it is the backup and restore of anything a user happens to lose.

Another feature I really like is that we can stagger our backups a little bit. By that I mean we can download whatever needs to be backed up to an external disk, or do it locally and then load it up. That has proven to be very valuable in a couple of cases, especially with people who have bad connections.

It's very important to us that Cove provides cloud-based data protection. Disk space is something we always fight for, whereas this solution is out there and secure. We don't have to worry about it. And to make matters even better, our users can get it from anywhere in the world, if they need to.

In addition, because the package includes cloud storage, we don't need to worry about hosting it inside. That was very important to us. And because the vendor has data centers worldwide, our reps in Europe and other places can get to what they need quickly and easily. Those local data centers also mean we were able to meet legal requirements.

The cloud-first architecture, in addition to eliminating the need to worry about hosting the storage, is very convenient because we have a very mobile workforce. Our people know how to get back what they deleted, quickly and easily. And, of course, the redundancy helps.

One area I don't like has to do with the agent that goes on the system. Deploying it is a piece of cake, but something I have noticed is that if a system stays offline for some length of time, say for a week or so, I may have to go back in and reinstall the agent to get it back in business. I don't know what's causing that. That's the only issue I have had.

We've been using Cove Data Protection for six to eight months.

It's pretty stable and runs very well, except for that one little glitch with the agent. If the systems are online every day, like mine is, I almost never have a problem.

Scaling it is very simple and it scales very well. If I have a system that I need to put it on, it takes two minutes and there it is. It grows well.

Currently, we have 150 to 220 laptops scattered around the world and that's what we're backing up every day. Our extent of usage of the solution is stable. If we ever start growing again we will increase our usage.

Their technical support is great. They deserve a raise, every one of them. Any time I have had a question, they have always had an answer. If they don't know the answer, they'll admit it and they'll try to find the answer for me.

Positive

We used CrashPlan. Part of the reason we switched was that it was a lot more expensive. The other reason was that it was so difficult to administer. There wasn't one pane of glass you could look to know exactly what was going on in your environment.

One of the problems we ran into was that we used JumpCloud. We don't use Active Directory to push our software, so there was a little bit of a learning curve. The good news was that the Cove guys were there, hand-in-hand, with us, as was JumpCloud staff. That meant we were able to put a PowerShell script in there and push it out from there.

With JumpCloud, the system has to be online to push something out to it. A lot of the implementation involved seeing if a system was online and, if it didn't have it, push it to it. But now, it has become part of our build system, so we're in pretty good shape.

The other problem, of course, was Mac. I can deploy it just fine to a Mac, but somebody then has to do some stuff on the other end. Unfortunately, that's just how it is with Macs. Some people have responded and done the work we needed for them to do, but we're still "fighting" with others. 

Overall, deploying it wasn't that terribly difficult. It just involved a few learning curves. We had it about 95 percent deployed within three or four days. If everybody had been online at the same time, we probably could have done it in a couple of hours.

In terms of maintenance, I have to stay on top of it a little bit, but that's not a big deal to me because I have a dedicated maintenance day. On that day I look at the systems and do what I need to do with them. Part of that is looking at the systems that haven't been backed up in a while and asking why. If they're online, I get in there and try to do a backup. If the agent won't respond, I either use a script to try to restart the agent or I redeploy the agent to it. It's the nature of the beast. You have to stay on top of any solution.

There's less of a chance of losing our data and, in the instances where we have had to restore, or migrate people, it has worked beautifully. You just can't put a price tag on that peace of mind.

I like the pricing and licensing. The only option I would like to see is an adjustable scale. Right now we have 250 seats and we're not using all of them. It would be nice to be able to save that little bit of money by being able to buy just what we need.

We looked at Acronis. Part of the problem with that solution was the cost. With N-able we get more bang for our buck, and it is also easier to administer.

I'd tell a colleague who says that image-based backup is the only way to go is that there's a place for that, but you usually don't have to do an image-level backup. Sometimes, all you have to do is to get the little bits and pieces.

Cove Data Protection has a bit of a learning curve and it involves your users. How do they take care of themselves? You need to have those processes in place. Users should be able to restore their own stuff if they need to. Train them on how to do that and make documentation available out there to explain how to grab one little file, if that's all they need to do.

I am an Information Systems Manager and the company that I work for is using this solution to backup workstations and laptops as well as SQL and MySQL databases.

N-Able has allowed us to have peace of mind regarding backups. No more missed backup schedules and no need to go on a course to learn how to use the software. Very easy browser based backup and restore of files.

This must be one of the easiest backup products to install EVER! Just execute ONE command on a workstation. No Prompts, No confirmations, Nothing  to setup and configure. And then it just works!! A true set and forget solution.

Also, this is one of few databases that allow us to backup MySQL databases, most others only support Microsoft SQL. This solution also has a very user-friendly interface accessed through a web browser. Additionally, backups can be easily configured through N-able Backup.

Another great thing is that files can be restored in mere seconds! The solution backs up only the bits in the files that have been modified allowing us to store a lot of data within the backups without taking up a lot of storage space.

My final favourite feature is where you can set up a Hyper-V machine in continuous restore mode that matches a live VM. 

This solution is not very good for image restores, but really excellent for files, databases and System State restores. For normal restores you use the browser - this is SUPER easy and works really fast and very well. 

For image restores you need to create a USB stick and embed the motherboard drivers into the boot image, which is a bit of a pain. It then recognised the first drive on the SATA controller as drive 1 and not any NVMe drives, even if the NVMe drive is the boot drive, so you have to be VERY careful not to overwrite the wrong drive during a restore. I found it safest to physically disconnect any drives you do not wish to accidentally restore to. A graphical interface showing make, model and volume names names (and not only drive numbers) would solve this issue.

The solution also does not allow users to enable or disable backups when a laptop is using mobile data. You have to open the browser and click on Cancel to stop the backup from running. You can however throttle backups during certain hours, which is useful. Sometimes, remote users will connect via their mobile phone and it will use their data to perform the backup, which is very costly. If there was a way to enable and disable the backup when using mobile data, they would not have this complaint. In fairness, this would be an issue with most backup systems.

Lastly, when your On-Premises Storage Node storage is full, you are required to add another On-Premises Storage Node. I would have liked a feature to add another drive to the original Storage Node and just including it in the Node.

I have been using this solution for the past two years.

This is a very stable backup solution. N-Able provides a management dashboard with graphic illustrations showing the number of servers and workstations backed up with a detailed view over the past thirty days, making backup management a breeze.

This solution is very scalable and is the easiest backup installation I have ever seen in the past 35 years. We currently have fifty N-able users.

I have been in touch with customer support and have also participated in several online training sessions. They have a brilliant website where many of your questions can be answered,  but if I needed to get in touch with them, they were just a phone call away and were able to sort out issues right over the phone. In the event they were unable to figure it out over the phone, they would log in on my computer in order to figure it out.

Positive

We previously used Redstor and Acronis. In order to use Redstor we had to go on courses and it was super expensive. We then switched to Acronis. Acronis is excellent for image restores, and we use it to this day for that. However their cloud backup solution has becoming increasingly more complicated and even if you use on-site storage you have to pay for the amount of storage used on your own machines. In comparison N-Able is a breeze to install and setup and there is absolutely ZERO comparison in terms of how easy it is to install N-able on many machines in a large corporation and also to restore files.

You need to have some technical knowledge to setups the On-Site Cloud, but if you use the N-Able Cloud, it is very easy. What makes this product absolutely a pleasure to install is that it creates a single, very small EXE installation file, making this the easiest backup solution to install EVER. 

I was able to implement this solution by following documentation. N-Able also provided REALLY great on-boarding and assisted remotely where needed. I was able to easily distribute the backup agent to all machines on the network using the N-Central management system. The users did not even know the backup agent was being installed. Their machines just started running backups.

We have saved a fortune moving from other backup solutions. I am very glad we made the move, and management is pleased with the huge cost savings.

I believe that the price is very reasonable in comparison to other options. It is cheaper than both Redstor and Acronis and since we are now using our own on-premise cloud, there is absolutely no comparison since we have unlimited storage rather than paying per gigabyte even for using our own onsite storage. We are currently able to backup fifty computers for the same price that we use to backup five servers on Redstor.

You will never miss a backup with this solution. With other solutions, if it missed a scheduled backup, it wouldn't back up that day at all. But with N-able Backup, backups run like clockwork. If a machine was off at the scheduled backup time, a backup will run as soon as the customer switches their machine on, even when they are working remotely. You are able to throttle transmission speed to limit data usage during certain hours.

The on-premises cloud is a cost-saving option for anyone with fast fibre lines, proper servers, and secure server rooms.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. I would have given it 10 out of 10 if the image restore was a bit better. 

I mostly use it for data backup.

N-Able, as a whole, has given me the RMM solution that I desire and the backup solutions that I desire. Cove Data Protection has also reduced the time needed for backup administration. We've been able to redeploy those resources, or my customers have been able to redeploy those resources, as needed.

And as an MSP, it has streamlined the way I handle data protection, primarily for Windows and Windows Server. Confirming that my backups are complete is down to just three clicks, rather than a bunch of checking. It allows me to offer the same level of service to a higher number of customers.

Another benefit is that it uses less storage for a given number of restore points compared to a traditional image backup product.

The most valuable feature has been the data backup. That's what I use the most. I use archiving on my business desktop, but I haven't sold archiving to customers. But it's extremely important that Cove provides cloud-based data protection with backup, disaster recovery, and archiving. That is a necessity for my insurance. As an IT company, my insurance would cost more if my backups were not offsite and off-network. And for the same reasons, the cloud-first architecture which keeps backups off of local networks is also very important.

Another very important aspect is that the vendor has multiple data centers worldwide for backups, because of the speed of accessing information.

I've been using N-able Cove Data Protection for approximately four years. At first, it was under somebody else's account and then under mine.

The stability is very good. I have not had any issues with it.

The scalability is very good. I could go from one to 1,000 and the only difficulty would be the time spent during the installation.

Currently, I have two servers and one desktop under the solution and I anticipate growing that by another eight desktops very soon.

Their technical support is very good. When I have needed their support, they have been knowledgeable about the product and able to correct the issue.

Positive

Originally I was using connected USB hard drives, but those ceased to meet my needs. The first solution I went to after that was Cove Data Protection. I had to get backups offsite and off-network. At that point, it became a mandatory switch.

The only area that needs improvement is that it is a little bit difficult when you get into virtual machines. The initial deployment of Cove is a little tedious, not for standard machines, but when you get into specialty stuff, like Hyper-V. After you get the initial deployment complete, it's perfectly fine. For a standard installation, it is straightforward. For a complex installation, you have to work through it and get rid of all the errors.

I install it and manage the solution. The only thing that you need to deploy the solution is an internet connection. I just need someone to let me remote into the PC to install the program.

I have never had to perform maintenance on the solution because, once I have gotten it up and running correctly, it has run smoothly. The only thing that I do that is maintenance-based is, once a day at the proper time, log in to the solution to check to make sure that it's all green and then log out.

I rate it a 10 out of 10. It's a product you would want to purchase.