N-able Cove Data Protection Reviews

N-able Cove Data Protection serves as a free backup for files, documents, and services in Office 365. The solution is useful for its archive features for IT environments.

The solution's most valuable features are bare metal recovery, standby image, failover in Azure, and failover in Hyper-V. The documentation of the protection part with the solution can help its end users look at how they can take care of their own data protection for documents.

N-able Cove Data Protection for Microsoft 365 is an area with shortcomings that need improvement.

The amount of time to get to the support engineers of the solution is too much, so the support team needs to arrange for a verbal or quick chat with the product's users.

I have been using N-able Cove Data Protection for seven years. My company is N-able's super-elite partner.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution's technical support is great. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

My company deals with various tools from Commvault, Symantec, Veeam, Acronis, and ShadowProtect. In general, my company deals with a lot of different solutions and customers. I can say that though all the solutions my company deals with, which are similar to N-able Cove Data Protection, meet the industry standards, none of them are perfect, and because of this, I cannot rate any of the tools a ten out of ten. In short, I can give the tools we deal with in our company an eight out of ten.

The initial setup of N-able Cove Data Protection was very easy.

The solution is deployed on a hybrid cloud.

Considering my company's current setup and servers, N-able Cove Data Protection can be deployed in 20 seconds.

N-able Cove Data Protection is an averagely-priced product.

I recommend those who plan to use N-able Cove Data Protection buy it.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

It is backing up customers' servers. On the machine that they wish to protect, they deploy an agent on it.

It is essential for all businesses to back up their IT systems. In our view, it has to be automatic, offsite, and require no user intervention at the client level. The SolarWinds product provides all of those things.

The solution supports full-system, bare-metal, file, and folder. One of the reasons that we like the system is that it maintains up-to-date standby virtual machines, which can be booted at short notice if the customer's primary device fails. So, the predominant recovery methodology that we have is backing up to hypervisor as a VM. We have used the bare-metal recovery in the past and that has its use, but all the ones that we have put onto our customers in a commercial sense are all recovering to hypervisors.

Without cloud storage, we wouldn't do it. If it didn't have offsite storage, we would not be using it as a backup solution.

Because we have confidence in the backup, we feel more free to experiment with our customer systems. For instance, if we have a server, and we've sat there scratching our heads because we really need to make this big change on the server, but if it goes wrong, then the customer will be screaming at us for a month. We can now go, "Oh, it doesn't really matter. Just do it. If it all goes horribly wrong, then 30 minutes later, I'll have pulled the backup from last night. It will all be good. 

Because we can keep images of our clients' machines on our test machines in our workshop, I can go, "You know what? I'll spin up their copy from last night, make the changes I want to make, and if it all goes bang, then I'll just delete it." Then, tonight, they'll put a fresh copy on it. So, it's freed us up from the worry of working on live machines. 

From the customer's point of view, if it all goes tip top tomorrow due to things like ransomware, they have a backup from Friday. So, who cares?

I have used the solution for complicated recovery scenarios, such as a complex database recovery, to the point where SolarWinds is now using some of the techniques that we have developed in our office as part of their mainstream products. I find it extremely easy to manage the solution in such scenarios, but then I have immersed myself in the product for five years. If you are experienced at building and using virtual machines to get backups, e.g., if you can drive VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V, then I would guess the recovery process is almost trivial. You literally download the software, type in the access codes for the date set that you want, and press "Recover". It is pretty much that simple.

The recovery speed from the cloud depends on how big your data set is, how fast your broadband connection is, and how spry the Internet is feeling that day. Here are a couple of examples: 

1. We have a remote system in our stockroom downstairs where we can do test builds. If I tell it to build a server that it hasn't built before, it has to pull the data out of the cloud, and and it is sort of a standard size server, then you are looking at about four hours of time. However, we have good broadband, and it's being built onto a pretty potent system.
2. In the normal course of events onsite, as well as having a cloud image, it also keeps an image copy on a local data store. In which case, I can pull up a server back for a client in about 15 minutes. This is something that I did the other day.

The biggest thing from our point of view is its reliability. It gives us very few problems compared to other solutions that we have trialed. 

You can maintain multiple copies of the hot standbys, which is a huge benefit to the protection of customers.

It is adaptable.

The efficiency of the solution’s resource and bandwidth use when it comes to both backup and recovery is extremely good. Most of the time, I'll arrive in the morning, grab my morning coffee, fire up the console, and it's all green ticks, then the job is done and we send the customer their invoice. It's difficult to think of any way that the efficiency could be improved because it all just sort of works in a sensible time.

Commercially, they offer the product in two different formats. There is the full imaging backup, and there is also an alternative. You can pay for simple data backups and pay by the gigabyte that is consumed. Unfortunately, you cannot have those two products in the same dashboard. So, I have to switch between dashboards to look at:

1. All the servers being imaged. 
2. All the private laptops who have their "My Documents" folders backed up. 

That is a bit of a hassle, but it is not a deal breaker. It would be very nice if it was all on the same dashboard. I check our clients for the imaging product (the expensive one) every morning. I check the people who are paying us for data-only backup once a week. Therefore, once a week, I have to log out of portal A and log onto portal B to check if it's all good, then I log back onto portal A. It would be nice if I didn't have to do that, but it's certainly not something that keeps me awake at night.

We don't use the solution’s automated recovery testing because SolarWinds made me cross. When they released it, I went, "Oh, well, that's quite good." Because if you use the system, then it supposedly spins up, and on the portal, it gives you a screenshot of the booted device. So, I phoned up, and I said, "Oh, that's really quite cool. How much is that?" They said, "No, no, no. It's all included in your license." I went, "Okay then," and went and deployed it on about half the fleet. One of the options that our customers have is they can pay us a small amount every month for us to test the recovery just to prove that it's viable, and I thought, "Well, this will do that for us. Nice." Then, in the next invoice, we got a charge for it. While It was not a huge amount, I took offense at the fact that we were told that it would be a no extra cost option that was part of our license, but it turns out that it's chargeable. Therefore, we haven't used it since.

We have been using it for about five years.

I don't think that we have actually had any downtime since we started using it.

As far as I can see, there is no limit to its scalability.

We have 13 servers and about a dozen private individuals on the data-only version.

That technical support is excellent and knowledgeable. We haven't yet thrown anything out to them that they haven't been able to fix in relatively short order. Of all the IT companies that we deal with as suppliers, I'm pretty sure they are the best that we have ever dealt with.

It is very seldom that I throw a question at them where they have to punt it up to the next level. So, their Tier 1 support is really first class. On the odd occasion that we have had to go to their Tier 2 support, those are the developers of the product. Therefore, you get straight through to the developers in Tier 2, which is very good.

I have a problem at the moment, which is probably down to the definition of the host machine, not the backup solution. It seems to be something integral to the VMware version that we're using on a specific machine, but we've ended up, after two or three conversations, with a situation that works. Even though it's not particularly elegant, it meets all my criteria, it's automatic, and the end result is recoverable. The fact that it puts a warning up once a day on my dashboard is something I'll just have to live with until they source it out permanently. However, it's the exception rather than the rule.

The solution that we had in place for this tier of business prior to us doing SolarWinds was a limitless nightmare. I reckon that I spent probably 75 percent of my working hours managing the system, and it was not working properly. It was truly hideous. That has now gone down to 10 minutes a day, which is just me checking all the backups. If there is a warning, I just check that the warning is something that I can live with or determine if I have to take a bit of remedial action. Therefore, that percentage has dropped dramatically. However, it's been so successful that we now have a lot more customers using it than before. Obviously, that means the work load goes up a bit, but that's fine. That is what we're paid for, because more customers means revenue.

I struggled with our previous solution for 18 months. It was practically my full-time job for 18 months. At no point, in those 18 months, did it do a backup that was restorable. 

We used the Max Backup product in a very small way for a couple of customer's laptops, so we thought that was what it was. SolarWinds invited us along to a little seminar locally in Birmingham. We went along, and a simple, "Yeah, we quite appreciate the fact that you're buying 20 quid worth of backup offers for these two guys, but you do know we've got enterprise class products as well?" They made a very good presentation and impression on us. They discussed the pricing, and it all seemed very advantageous, so we signed up the following day.

The initial setup is ridiculously simple, but then again, I've done so many of them. You set it up on the site and that gives you a device name and password. Then, you download it on the client, install it, and put in the device, then put in the password. After that, you set up the encryption key and press "Backup". It is not hard. The killer is if someone loses the encryption key, then the whole thing is a waste of time.

Because you can only recover if you have the encryption key, we are very careful in logging and maintaining the encryption keys for our clients' backup systems. Though, I can just imagine someone who writes it on the back of an envelope that his tax demand came in and that accidentally goes in the skip. Then, three weeks later, when he needs to do a recovery, he can't find it and that will be a problem. That is the only "Gotcha." You have to be very careful with your credentials for the backup.

The deployment takes me longer than anyone else because I understand what I am dealing with and take more time and care. 

• Takes 30 seconds on the platform to generate the new instance. 
• Takes a couple of minutes to download it on the client, then a couple of minutes to install it. So, it takes five minutes get it installed. 
• I will then take half an hour just testing the various scenarios before I turn on the scheduler and let it get on with its own stuff. 

If you are spending an hour doing the deployment, then you are doing something wrong.

Once it is installed, I just choose the smallest file that I can find and back that up. I check that the backup goes through okay. If it appears in the local cache, appears on the web platform, and I can copy it back to location of my choice (all of which takes five minutes), only then do I know that the backup is fundamentally sound, and go, "Right." Because the thing with incremental backups, the first backup can sometimes take a week because you're backing up absolutely everything: Gigabytes and gigabytes of data. It's only after that first backup is done that it becomes incremental, then it does it in a couple of minutes. So, I'm not going to unleash it to do a backup that might take 30 hours only to find that I have had a bit of trouble with one of the settings, and it hasn't gone how I thought it was going to go. So, my implementation strategy: You just back up a file, check that everything works exactly as you expect, and then let it get on with it.

I do the deployment and maintenance. It takes an hour to set up a new machine, then I spend 10 minutes a day checking it.

if you want to phone up a reseller, like us, we don't put a big margin on it and can make it work for you from day one. Whereas, if you go direct, you will trip over a few things, which we tripped over five years ago. There is no need to trip over them again and reinvent the wheel. For example, when you're working in an enterprise environment inside Active Directory, you set up the machine which will host your local copy. You need to authorise the share to the backup system. You set up a share based on the Active Directory username that you have created to manage the backup system, and it's all good. If the machine that you're protecting, i.e., the Active Directory controller, goes and fails, then you cannot get to the speed vaults (local copy) because it's protected and only accessible through local directory users. The answer to this is that you set up a local user inside the machine which hosts the copy, accessing using the local user credentials, and then it's all fine. However, that is not obvious, and it's not documented. You only find out about it when it all goes horribly wrong one day, and you can't get to the local speed vault.

We have absolutely seen a healthy ROI.

Something that we make a little money on is if a customer wants to pay for the option to have an onsite copy on their premises (ready to run). We then supply the hardware for that. It tends to be a fairly low spec server. We either sell that, in which case we make a small margin on it, or it goes in as a rental cost on the monthly.

The solution has reduced backup times by an immeasurable amount. Its backups are incremental, so you are only backing up data changes based on the last 24 hours or so. If you are also maintaining the stored images, the restores are also only incremental, happening in minutes. Whereas, with a lot of the other solutions that we have looked at, each time it goes to refresh the restore, then it has to build a completely new image. That takes forever. This solution also improves recovery time.

SolarWind's total cost of ownership is an extremely good value.

There is a basic product and pricing package. Clients can add on additional pricing for the local storage and hot standbys (onsite and offsite). We like that we can build a solution that fits the client's requirements and pockets.

When you have a device/appliance on the site quite a lot of the other enterprise class backup people insist that you have their appliance, which is frankly offensively expensive. Because when you pry the top off, it's just a standard 19-inch tin box with a standard Intel I5 in it, some RAM, and a hard drive. Then, you go, "Why have they just charged me 5,500 quid for a box, which I could have probably build for under 500." Whereas, with the SolarWinds product, they don't have that. The backup appliances that we have onsite are just plain cooking PCs. We can build our own machines, which is reflected in the price that we can offer a customer.

There is something you have to do each time you effectively buy an imaging/server license, which is a fixed price. So, if I set a new machine up on the portal to be backed up, it will cost us one more license and appear on our next invoice. With each license comes 500 gigs of cloud storage, which is pretty much as you'd expect. The nice thing about the SolarWinds product is you pool it. Therefore, if you have 10 devices, you have five terabytes of storage, then we can divvy that up however we like. For example, if we have one customer who has a tiny little machine that has only 200 gig and another customer who has a machine that is 700 gig, I still only need two licenses. This is because the 700 gig and 200 gig make 900 gig, which is less than the one terabyte that those two licenses give me.

This pooling means it is very cost-effective from our point of view. It is just an example of where they have built the system to reflect the customers' needs not to maximise their profit. Because they could quite easily say, "Nope. As soon as an individual machine hits that five terabyte limit, you have to pay the sliding data scale to have extra storage on it." They don't, they go, "Well, it's gone over its limit, but you still got stuff left over from some of the other machines. You can use that for free." That is a very good indicator of a company who is customer-focused.

We have probably evaluated all of the solutions in this market. Technically, they all do pretty much the same thing. Their core product, which is automatic backup, goes into the cloud and leverages the VSS inside the server. 

SolarWinds is the only one whose even close to that level of flexibility and modularity that we need. There are many offerings in the market, but the reason we chose SolarWinds is that it is modular. For each individual client, we can put a system together with as many features as they want, need, or are willing to pay for. In other words, we can go from a very minor backup operation for only a few pounds a month to many hundreds of pounds for the full solution. 

With due respect to various persons around the planet, if I have a backup system with a customer who's screaming at me because his server has gone down, and he wants his backup running, then I don't want to phone up and be answered by a call centre in the Philippines telling me that someone will get back to me, because they're in some far-flung parts of the world and the call won't come through until two o'clock in the morning. That's not going to float my boat.

When I phone the guys up at SolarWinds, I am on first name terms with all of them. Nine times out of 10, I will get through to one of the guys inside of 30 seconds. Normally, within 15 minutes, the problem is resolved. That is worth more than money. 

Those are the two things differentiate them: the flexibility and modularity of the system along with the quality of their support. At this level, cost is not the number one driving factor.

We use one other backup product. It is considerably more expensive than the SolarWinds product. However, what it does, it has integrated into that product cloud virtualization in the event of the customer losing their premises as well as their hardware. In other words, their backup systems have gone as well. For example, Worcestershire, England spends three months of the year under water. We know it's going to happen, and we just get on with it. However, if that premises was flooded and they lost that backup as well, they can all decamp to an office space, somewhere local. Then, we can spin the whole infrastructure in the cloud, where they can VPN to the cloud, and within days, carry on as normal while we rebuild their infrastructure. 

SolarWinds does have something similar, but unless you're willing to pay for a vast amount of storage, AWS is too expensive to maintain. For example, if the flooding scenario happens, you have to provision some AWS space, recover into the AWS space, and then you can do it. You are looking at 24 hours, maybe more, to make that happen. Whereas, the other product, it's literally press the button that says, "Virtualizing Cloud", and by the time your cup of coffee has got down to a drinkable temperature, it's all working. That is the one feature that SolarWinds is missing. Having said that, I wouldn't want it, if it puts the cost up significantly, because most of our customers do not consider that eventuality sufficiently likely to be worth paying for.

It is a very good system. We have very few problems with it.

Just do it. If you get stuck, find the guys in support and they'll talk you through it because it's very quick and easy. They are quite happy to come onto a Remote Desktop Session, and go, "No, you've got that wrong." 

It's a good product that is sensibly priced. Anyone who has a modicum of IT skills can make it work. 

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

We use MSP Backup & Recovery for just about any backup system, as long as it is running Windows or Windows Server.

We also have a couple of clients that have databases to back up. It does a very good job of automatically picking up an SQL or a MySQL database. If we need to restore just the database to another machine, although we don't have too many use cases for that, we have been able to do it when we tested it.

We use it for virtual machine backup and recovery as well. It does a great job of that. So even if a client has a host system and, say, one VM running on it for a special purpose, but they don't have the budget to pay for two backups for some reason, it does a great job of backing up the virtual machine itself, and it can be restored independently. 

A nice part about the SolarWinds backup and recovery solution is that I get to pick how it's deployed, and it's per-client. They really give you a lot of options with that. They pretty much have any feature that I, as an MSP, could want, and they let me choose how to provide their product to the client. I could cut out features if I wanted, which I don't, or I could add features as tiers to make a pricing bracket for myself to sell to them. I have one client that has a full, second dedicated server. It runs the virtual disaster recovery console, so it's constantly getting all the new backup images every day. If the first system goes down, the second system is able to bring it right back up.

I have other clients that just don't have that kind of budget. They simply need one workstation, not even a server, backed up. And they want me to be able to get either the files or the full image down from the cloud to put on a new machine. If the first one fails, they don't have the budget to have a disaster-ready plan where, if everything goes down, they have something running that takes it right back up. They have a spare computer onsite we would move things to. SolarWinds gives me the options to do both things very cleanly and to please those different levels of clients, without having to jump through too many hoops.

It does everything I want. I feel a lot better with it because I've already used it in the recovery scenarios and know it works and I've got guys testing things on a regular basis. The clients are happy because they know that I'm happy with the solution, because I'm usually going to suggest it over something else. It just makes everything so much easier on the backup. There used to be so much anxiety with other solutions because they were so much harder to manage.

This gives me a dashboard with a bunch of green, yellow, or red lights based on how things are going. I can put technicians into action based on things failing or not updating properly. And the few times we have had things go wrong, it has been easy to communicate with the client quickly and make them feel that we're very on top of it and aware of this process, just because of how the system is set up to work.

In general, we used to have to have that "backup conversation" with a client, every once in a while, to see how things were going. Now, because this is our baseline of how we expect things to work in a perfect world, even if they don't have this, it's made our backup documentation process easier. We tell the customer, "Hey, this is how it would work in a perfect world, but this is how your system works. If you want to get closer to where it could be, here are some things we can do." It has made it easier to talk to the clients about the options that they have.

Before, I didn't have a whole lot of confidence in the solutions we had, compared to the confidence I have in this. That lack of confidence in the products we were using made it harder for me to even have that conversation with the client. SolarWinds has just completely flipped that around, and that's true for other people inside our org as well. Other people were having the same grievances I was. It was hard to find a good backup solution where it didn't feel like we, as the MSP, were getting shafted in some way and we were having to charge the client a lot more because of that. It was especially true when you get into how a lot of vendors price their cloud backups compared to SolarWinds. It's absolutely crazy when you look at the cost comparison. So having that extra confidence and being happy with the solution has really changed the entire game and that's because of how it is priced and how they let us present the product itself.

The cost for the customer has gone down because we don't have them buying as much. We don't run a second recovery computer at many locations, unless the system is vital to every operation, because we have the Local SpeedVault that we use. It's either an onsite NAF or an external hard drive that stores all the stuff locally for the machine it would need to restore to. It gives us a really good, fast solution, compared to pulling it down from the cloud and messing with their bandwidth, especially if they have VoIP phones. The cost of investment has gone down. For a few niche customers that are much larger, the cost has gone up, but the return on investment, as far as data security goes, is much bigger. Previously, if I would have had them invest that much in another product, I wouldn't have felt good about it. But asking a larger client to put in a second server, so I can always push their stuff out right away if there is a failure, is a pretty big deal. By comparison, with Carbonite I actually had that set up, but when I tried to use the tool not only could I not get help using it properly, I never got the thing to work. With SolarWinds it was so simple, it felt almost too easy.

In addition, there is much less of a time investment from my techs, compared to before. That's the nicest thing it has changed in our everyday operation.

And for me, it has drastically reduced the amount of time spent on backup administration. We had people spread out on different odds and ends for different customers, for whatever solutions the customer wanted. We didn't have one solution. Between keeping things documented as well as I could, as a one-man show on that end, and actually being able to test stuff, if I could test stuff, and always trying to figure out the products, I'm probably saving a good 10 hours a month, if not a lot more just on that. If I had kept the solution we had before and grown to the number of customers I have now, I don't doubt it would have required another whole employee to manage things, with the amount of backup and the different solutions that we had to use. This one ended up bringing together any use cases somebody has, because most of our customers are running in a Windows environment. It fits their needs perfectly.

As for backup time on the computer and how long it takes to run, it's insane how much quicker it is compared to constantly having to check back and forth between what's going on on the computer and what I see in the cloud. Carbonite had poor solutions for looking at what was actively happening. With SolarWinds, after I install it on the computer, I never have to log in to the computer again, if I'm working at a higher level where I'm not interacting with customers. I can always pull up these backup systems remotely from the cloud. I pull up the system, it pulls up a webpage, and it gives me the percentage it's processing and how much data that actually is.

And if my local is synchronized with the cloud, I get to look at all this data in one place, compared to going back and forth between a local computer and maybe a website and one other thing. It's all in one spot. I can manage every computer from an easy console. It has probably saved 55 percent, if not more, of actual employee time. It's not something I've actually calculated, but I am the person who was spending that time before, and that's when we were supporting way fewer clients. We've grown this product with us as we've added people to it. I don't think we have many customers with an important local system that we haven't gotten to move to SolarWinds, unless they've outright refused to back up what they have.

The backups themselves seem to run much quicker, even though they're going to the cloud. It has two different phases. The time it takes to process the backup on the computer is quicker, especially if I've got my Local SpeedVault there, or my secondary system that is acting as a speed vault to bring it back up quickly if the system fails. Having either of those there, it gets done within minutes, most of the time. There have been very few times where I've seen it go above 30 minutes, and that's on a bigger system and when they had a lot of stuff going on that day. On my old system, I'd be watching this program take time to launch, run the backup job usually it would make the shadow copies first. This seems to do all that stuff so much quicker.

On the other end, it uploads to the cloud. If I did have a manual upload to the cloud before, or was using something like Carbonite, this seems to get to the cloud quicker than those. And if it's going to a local hard drive or a local secondary system that is a failover, it's stupid-quick. It's the difference between looking away for a little bit at another task while it runs, and it's done, compared to keeping another computer up or another page up with a loading bar for a bit, while I'm constantly going back to it and waiting for it to finish. That's the difference it's made in my every-day.

When it comes to recovery times, I'll give you two different scenarios. In the small scenarios, where just files or folders have been lost or deleted and we need to find them and restore them from within the last 30 days, it's gone from 10 minutes down to closer to seven or five minutes, because we know exactly where to go. Every one of our techs who is trained on this can get there super-easy. They're not having to memorize three systems.

The other end is the big scenarios. I've had an entire server go down or a natural disaster that has stopped the business from functioning, and I needed to get them up and running one way or another on a completely separate computer. I was only relying on my cloud data to do this. In those scenarios, it has reduced our recovery time by a minimum of 12 hours.

The difference is quite crazy. Before, even if I could get stuff down to another server, I had to install the server OS and get stuff running. I had nothing else that did a good virtual disaster recovery in the big cases. Virtual disaster recovery is so big because for any system, no matter how complicated it is, I can already have a server running that has Hyper-V installed, and I can get this thing up and running with Hyper-V within a matter of hours. Sometimes, it's less than an hour, depending on how quick my download is. Really, at that point, I'm limited to: Do I have local data I can source from as far as the backups go, or am I only going from the cloud? If it's only the cloud, my biggest limit is my bandwidth. Going full-blast at our shop, if we let that server do that, we can get somebody up and running in less than an hour, even if they have something like a 200-gigabyte setup. On a larger server with multiple terabytes, it does take longer. There's no way around that, unless they have that secondary system set up onsite. But for the people that do have that, I manually log in and start that secondary server up. I literally click a button and configure one or two things and I'm good to go. It's insane compared to before. I did not have a solution that came even close to that, a couple of years ago.

The most valuable feature by far is the Virtual Disaster Recovery. On top of that is the bare-metal recovery. The recovery options that we have are great. We have tested the Virtual Disaster Recovery and the bare-metal recovery in just about any scenario you can think of. We have even restored bare metal, a full server, to a laptop, and had full functionality. It's just insane how well it works and how simple it is. It does most of the work for you. I don't feel like I'm thinking too hard when I do this. I understand how the system works on the back-end, and what it needs to do, but I don't want to concentrate on that when I've got so many other things going on. This really does just so much of the legwork for me.

In terms of other types of recovery scenarios, it covers something as simple as somebody who has access to a shared folder and they delete a file on it because they weren't thinking about the fact that it's for everybody, not just for them. That's the scenario where, if it's within 30 days — because this has a 30-day history for backup — they call me and tell me that they deleted the file. I just ask them for either the file name or location or as much stuff as they can remember. I log in to the backup system from my console, get into the recovery part remotely — I don't even have to log in to the workstation hosts or the server host — I find yesterday's file and folder lists from a nice calendar view, and then I find the file that was there. I click it and restore it to the machine. I can restore it to a different spot if I want, but I usually just choose to restore it in place. I call them and confirm it's there. I've never had to take more than five minutes. It's quite nice for doing basic stuff like that.

A more extreme case was when we had somebody's entire system go down and we were able to virtually restore it, no issues whatsoever, getting it running offsite. We were able to link them up on a VPN until we got a temporary server there and fixed things, because they had a catastrophic failure. Luckily it was a simple server, so it wasn't too much work, but it was nice to keep them up, with their domain, in the meantime.

The most complicated recovery scenario is a host machine running multiple VMs, where we only have the host machine, itself, backed up. This is somebody who doesn't want to pay for the second server onsite, so our company has temporary servers. We're very physically close, meaning we can do a bare metal restore or a virtual disaster recovery and get everything they have up and running within about an hour after the failure. That is one where we have the file folder system state and VSS backup recovery running and, no matter what fails on their system, we can get it back out. Even if it's not full system failure, we can restore most things remotely. If it is full system failure, even if we have to bring it to a different site, we can get the data down within about an hour and then get it to wherever they need.

SolarWinds is very flexible and lets us do things the way we want to and we can do them quickly. For the clients that don't want to pay for that extra stuff to get it done quickly, we can explain to them that it's going to set things back this much. We really let our clients choose how they want to do things like this. So if they want a backup and recovery system, this one is very easy, because it's paid month-to-month and has very specific data caps and overage charges for those caps. It's super-easy to lay it out for any level of client, be it a one-person operation or a business that has 300 users and allows "bring your own computer."

Depending on what they have, we can give them an easy projection of what their investment in a system like that would be. There won't be any surprises such as, "Oh, we went over 1 terabyte, we now have to get to the 5 terabyte cap," which is something I had to deal with when I used Carbonite. Instead, if I go a gigabyte over the standard cap for a server or workstation, I pay a set amount of money that doesn't scale up or down. I know exactly what I can do with this solution for any client. I know exactly how much I can charge them and it's done monthly. It's easy for them to drop in and drop out on a monthly basis if they're nervous, because they're not dealing with that annual commitment that a lot of solutions shove at you, even if you get to pay monthly. That's a really big advantage in terms of peace of mind after it gets running.

And all of that is aside from the fact that they give you free archiving, which is really nice. Not many other solutions do that, cost-wise. I get to do as many archives of a system as I want and it doesn't count against the data for that user or customer.

It also gives me a single dashboard for all types of different sources it's backing up, such as databases, files and folders, system state, etc. It gives you your entire client list. It gives you a daily update of green, yellow, or red. Yellow means something kind of went wrong and maybe you should look at it, but wait. Red means something definitely went wrong and you need to take some sort of action to adjust. Green means every single thing worked properly, nothing had any errors.

I get a daily email that I'm able to integrate into my ticket system. The tickets come in only if anything fails. If something fails, my technicians get details of exactly what failed with an error code. And if I go into the console and look at the error itself, it gives me details and a resource center, from SolarWinds, where I can look it up. I can Google from there and figure it out.

That kind of information has made our backup operations much smoother, especially because the few times the Help articles haven't answered something for us, support has eventually gotten it to work, even if it seemed like a niche situation where we've got five other clients deployed like this yet one of them is having this really odd issue. SolarWinds support has been able to dig down. I have sent them logs and they've looked through them — hundreds of lines. They highlighted one, showed me what was wrong, told me what to fix, and it worked after that.

A better default view on my dashboard would be great. There is a lot of useless information there that it pulls up. They could present the dashboard slightly better, in terms of the extra information after the first five columns. The first five columns are awesome. After that, I don't care about the rest, and there are another seven things after that. You can customize it, and I do have my own customized dashboard, but it doesn't give me any option to make that the default view.

They could work a little bit on how they present you with your landing page. The first time I log in to this from any login window, I want a page that's a little bit more useful. This one gives me great info as to if my backup is good, up and running, or if it's had a certain number of errors. But after that, it tells me stuff like my product, which I do all-in for all our customers, so I don't care. It tells me my profile and I usually do a manual setup for most customers that's documented on my documentation system, which is also with SolarWinds. So I don't care about my profile version. All that stuff which is extra, that I really don't care about, is on this default view, and they don't let me save my custom view as my landing page. I have to go and find it again. It's deep down inside a menu at the very bottom and I can't make it go anywhere else.

Another point to be aware of is that the initial cloud backup, if you've got more than a terabyte of data, can take quite some time, because it's completely dependent on the customer's internet speed. That is one thing that we have run into. When I asked SolarWinds about that they noted they already have a solution for that.

Since deploying it, there has only been one weekend where there was a stability issue, and that only caused a problem for one of our 24 clients who are on the solution. It cleared up the next day.

The scalability has been nice. I have had a system grow with this and I've had no issues. I'm not going to pretend that I've got a customer that has nine different servers or that I have 50 clients. But when I've had a single host server scale up its usage, this has handled it just fine. I've also scaled up the number of customers I have on the system. Both have been easy to work with. Scaling up the number of customers I support on my end has been easy, and scaling up the load on an individual host, running a large backup, has also been easy.

We're actually making a large push with most customers, if they have a system that requires it, to use something like this. Our criteria for them "requiring it" is that they have some sort of locally hosted program that is accessed by people at the business and that it's required for everyday use. If we've got somebody running QuickBooks off of a workstation, and they're really worried about backup, the workstation backup is priced well enough that it's worth having that always-up availability.

I generally don't go to tech support until I have a really serious issue. But the times I have gone to tech support, they have given me good information. Even if it didn't directly solve my issue, it helped me to solve that issue and it was good info to have in the first place. If they needed to escalate the ticket, they did so properly and fairly quickly, if not quickly enough in all cases. It's definitely better than a lot of other tech support I've dealt with.

We have been using SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery since the middle of 2018, when we started to need a recovery solution that was a bit better than what we had. Before we were using a custom solution of saving Windows backups to the cloud and to a local device. We had options there for bare-metal there and file recovery, but nothing that was overly reliable or easy to test.

I have found the initial setup to be incredibly straightforward, especially because of the tools it provides you with. There are "how-to's" everywhere. I'm logged in to my dashboard right now. My name is up in the top, right-hand corner. There's a big question mark right by my name. I click on it and I immediately have two big sections: Help and Resources. Help has all the manuals, how it works, and a live chat if I get stuck. Resources has my sales guide, my downloads for any product I need, and my About The Product section.

Any info I need about these products is immediately available, just like most of SolarWinds' other products. They do fairly decent documentation or, if they've bought the product, they keep the documentation and move it over to their systems pretty well. And they give me the live chat when I get stuck, which has been helpful.

Setting it up generally takes me about 10 minutes, even if the system is large and complex. It's 15 minutes, tops, if I am dealing with it taking a long time to spin up or download something.

Because I do the training on this in our company, for the most part, I have already set up training for the standard operating procedure for deploying this backup. It's a four-minute video with some notes that the techs can use if they get stuck. It shows the entire process, from creating the customer inside SolarWinds, to adding the device, and getting on the device and deploying the backup itself. The nice part is, if there's a person who needs to work on the computer — because you can do this on workstations that people need to use and it works super-great — we just download it and install it really quickly. Because it becomes available in the cloud to configure, all my configuration can be done remotely without interrupting a local user.

To deploy the solution for one customer, it requires just one person. With all the customers we currently have on this, about 24 customers, I've got three techs handling it, including checking on the system, running restorations on a quarterly basis, and physically testing those restorations. If I didn't have to run the restorations, and that's something our company just chooses to do, I would only need one person for this whole thing. As it is, it's me and two other techs, one who is a level-2 and one who is a level-3.

It's a set price for servers and workstations, so we're able to charge our clients an amount that is a fixed percentage above our cost.

The previous backup and recovery methods cost so much that we would mark up our cost to the client quite a bit less, in comparison. For example, with Carbonite, we were probably only marking it up a fraction of the markup we can charge now and, when I needed Carbonite to work, it didn't. We want to treat our customers right. We have really good relationships with them. We know a lot of them, even though we have so many, and we don't want to feel like we're doing them wrong. At the same time we have to pay our guys.

We had previously tried out using Carbonite for Windows and Windows Server backups, but we were getting very poor recovery results. The backup always gave a green light, but when we actually went to recover in tests or real-world scenarios, we were missing stuff. And there was not much help or explanation as to why, if we reached out to support. That went really poorly. We made a hardcore switched to MSP Backup & Recovery after. Because it's able, for a really good price, to recover in just about every scenario — even crazy ones, in the real world and in testing — we switched over to this and just didn't look back. If it's running Windows Server or Windows 10 or Windows 8, etc., we're going to use this to back it up if the client needs a backup.

Before I licensed SolarWinds, I looked into Datto and Veeam. The differences between those solutions and SolarWinds MSP were commitment and pricing. The features were there. I'm not going to say that the products aren't as good, but they were not priced competitively when I consider my customer base. 

I'm sure it is much different with somebody who has super-large organizations that they support. I would guess that they would end up going with Veeam, because Veeam is, honestly, a good solution. But when it has to account for anybody, from the small, one person operation, to the organization that has a domain and 300 users on it, Veeam doesn't work for me because I can't price it well for everybody. That's especially true when it comes to including the cloud backup solution. I liked Veeam as a solution but I did not like Veeam's pricing, comparatively, especially when I added cloud. The big differentiation was that cloud is automatically included with SolarWinds' solution. Not only that, but the cloud and the cost of using the software is all bundled together. If I go over the set amount of cloud storage, I pay an amount per gigabyte, so I can gauge that really easily. 

On top of that, when it comes to the pricing structure, SolarWinds does things that it seems would be counterintuitive to their making money, and that was impressive to me, because I'm used to most vendors doing the whole "cash grab" thing. First, they have incredible deduping. If duplicate files on the system get uploaded, they make one source file that gets uploaded and it links back to the multiple spots that it was copied from. This saves time and this also saves money. It's crazy that it works this well. These are scenarios where I was worried about restoring them, at first. I thought, "It doesn't seem like all the data is there; it's only backing up one-third of the total storage on the server." But no, it all worked perfectly. Everything is there in the full amount. So they even reduce the amount of money they could charge you for data overages by reducing the amount of data that they put on their servers.

With Datto and Veeam, it felt like I was paying for the software, and that once I got the software I would have to figure out the rest myself. With SolarWinds MSP, it felt more like I was being given a solution. Everything feels like it's tailored and included. With the other systems, I really felt like I was on my own. Datto's prices were not so great, so I went away from them really quickly and looked at Veeam. The impression I got from Veeam was, "Hey, we're Veeam, we've been around forever. Everybody knows us. Figure out how to use it." And if I wanted cloud storage it was so much extra. And it wasn't per gigabyte. I really didn't like the pricing structure and model they went with. Because it felt like I was paying for the software and everything else was an afterthought, something like SolarWinds, where the software is bundled with the cloud storage was really nice for me.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using MSP Backup & Recovery is that there are options out there that I can be confident in, and I don't feel like I have to break a customer's bank to offer them. It's a really big deal for us to be able to do that. Having tested it and used it at this level, it's changed so much how we view what can be done, for keeping even our small customers' data safe. Before, it felt like I had to do a lot of extra things for the smaller places, because they couldn't afford the solutions that were better. Now I have something that I can trust to just do that for them. And it's so easy to maintain that it's really hard to look back and see that we were using other stuff before.

My advice would be to understand that the features are there. Price it out, compared to the other solutions. Because they give you such clear-cut pricing with the system itself, it's really hard, when you get down to dollar and cents, for anybody else to compete, in my opinion. The only use case where that changes is maybe where many terabytes or petabytes of data are included, and you do not need a cloud solution. In that case your cloud solution is some sort of data center or solution you've set up yourself. If you need to back up to the cloud, and this goes for any size organization, and a data center is not an option, SolarWinds is something you have to consider. At least to price it out, especially considering you're never under any commitment, even if you want to try it for a month on one system. The worst case would be that you would get charged for a month of trying it out. 

What I did for us, beforehand, was that I tested how it worked on our systems. The R&D for that, for researching that and figuring it out, is $10 on a workstation, or $50 for that one month. How are you going to compare that to anything else, where you have to sign a contract? You might get a trial, but it's unlikely that you are going to be able to figure everything out in that time. It's so much easier to work with, in all aspects that I can think of, specifically as an MSP. It's not that I think this is the solution for everybody, but for MSPs that don't support incredibly large organizations, this is perfect. It is exactly the solution that I wish I had found years ago.

When it comes to resource and bandwidth use in terms of backup recovery, for the most part I have not yet run into an issue. The one thing I have seen is a light blip on the VoIP. One time, when I was new to this and I restored a grouping of folders for a customer, while it was pushing stuff down we had some reduced phone quality. That download was taking up some of their VoIP. People could hear them fine but they were getting some static. 

What I found out is that there's an option to limit bandwidth during the day. For every customer now, when I install the product, I just do a quick audit of their internet speed. Based on what they can get, I give the download and the upload a percentage of that, so that it won't affect other systems. The bandwidth usage is completely customizable. If you want it to, it'll use your whole connection to get something important, and you can change that on the fly. It's not like it takes time for those settings to push down. But if you want good, everyday operations, you just limit it to a healthy percentage of the bandwidth during the day, and you're good to go.

I am not using it to sell the automated recovery testing and I do not like that feature. I believe it has more of a risk for a false positive than anything. I have done the testing internally up until now with a team. When we have issues, we work on it as a group. We're all very aware of some of the pain points of restorations. One of those pain points is that, sometimes, that virtual disaster recovery is so good that even if I had a technician that did not configure a backup properly, if an error was made on our end, I don't get to see it because the virtual machine will spin up almost no matter what, Windows 10 and past. This system is that good. Even if I have a messed up computer that got backed up, it will still run and work and I've got to do a little bit more digging to figure out if it has an issue.

I had exactly that happen; not in a real-world scenario, but when our team was testing. I could have just said, "Okay, I'm going to do recovery testing and give you a green light when the VM turns on." It can do that. This system is so great that it can turn almost any VM on. This is more of a personal philosophy for how our company runs stuff, as opposed to the viability of the tool itself. SolarWinds does the most that it can really do, without manual interaction from a human being. It does a good image test to see if all your stuff is there and if the VM turned on. But if you do that and it allows you to become complacent, you could miss backing up the drive and never know it. We actually almost had that happen and it might have if we didn't do our own recovery testing and check for stuff like that.

Overall, I would give SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery a good 10 out of 10. There is not another product in the SolarWinds line of products that I'm happier with. This is the best of what they have, and I use almost every product they have, except their antivirus.

The highlights of this solution are the way that they price it, how easy it is to use, and how customizable it is. I get to choose exactly how I want to use it, since it comes, default, with every feature. I get to choose how I present it to customers, if I want to do that. This is a good product that's really fair, and it's not complicated.

We use it to do complete server backups, including system state, for disaster recovery. We also have a few workstations that we back up as well.

We are trying to promote everything being backed up on the platform: Out of sight, out of mind, just back up everything. We've created a new pricing model to help that along and hopefully clients will see the value in having that.

The single pane of glass saves a ton of time. We can sort by data resources and scroll down and see which servers have SQL, which servers have enabled the system state, which are only file and folders backups, and we see the Microsoft 365 SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Exchange, and OneDrive backups. If you set it up this way, it has color bars and each of the color bars represents 28 or 30 days or 31 days. When you hover over each day you can see the date. If it's a solid green or a light green that means it's great. If it's orange that means it failed once or twice or three times for whatever reason; whether you rebooted the server or whether there was a power loss and the server was off. You can figure out what the problem was really quickly.

If it's a server that's been on for a long time and that has always reported in, and the backup fails, it's literally as simple as remoting in, stopping the backup service controller, stopping cryptographic services, restarting that service, restarting the backup service controller and letting it back up off to the next pass. A few hours later, you look back and you say, "Everything's working again." It works like a charm. It really is a completely hands-off, set-it-and-forget-it system, with great alerting. 

I spend about five minutes in the portal, and even that is an exaggeration, just to make sure everything is good in the morning. I'll pop in at some point in the afternoon, and I'll pop in during the evening just make sure everything is good, because sometimes I don't check my email. I'll just go into the dashboard and see that single pane of glass and know that everything's working. I don't really think about backups. It's a tremendous time-saver. It's truly easy to use. There's a single pane of glass. You tweak it a little bit, create your filters, and then you look at it a few times a day. If I spend five minutes a day on it, that's a lot.

The most valuable feature is that it's hands-off. I log in every morning and there are pre-canned filters that I've created to make my life easier. I have something called server status color bars, and that gives me all the servers and, in a nutshell, I can see

• if any errors are being reported
• when the last backup was
• if one is not working, should there be one, and it literally jumps off the page.

You know right away that there's a problem, and that's accomplished through the filtering capabilities, because you can save a filter. Once it's set, you can even duplicate it and then change the parameters and create another filter. It's almost like using tags, but it's allowing you to see the information you want on the screen.

It literally takes me two seconds to understand, without even looking at alerts that have been generated, and to instantaneously have peace of mind that everything was backed up.

And If there's a problem, it's very quick to resolve.

It's also one of the easiest solutions I've used. In fact, out of the entire SolarWinds stack—next to the RMM solution, which is a very mature enterprise-ready solution—SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery is in its own class. It just works.

In addition, the solution provides a single dashboard for all types of data protection. And the single pane of glass gives you status.

It also reports and sends out email alerts, functions that are pretty simple to set up.

When we need to restore a file, we don't even have to remote into our client's system. We just log in to the system management, connect to that machine's Backup Manager remotely, and choose the file. If you know the exact file name you do a search and you can see all the files that have been backed up and when they were last backed up. We choose the most recent one, restore, and then say, "Okay, check to see if the file opens." It works that quickly.

In terms of the efficiency of the solution’s resource and bandwidth use, when you first load the client onto a server, you have the option of seeding the backup onto a local drive and then sending that drive to them for them to seed the backup, and then continue the backup. We don't do it that way. Most of our clients have modern internet bandwidth upload speeds that are very high. We've never had limitations in terms of upload speeds with SolarWinds. So we just kick off the backup and we don't limit bandwidth. It has really been very quick. With most of the server systems that we deal with, the upload is very quick.

The cloud storage, wherever it's backing up to, is happening behind the scenes and you really don't realize it. It basically just starts backing up to the cloud until it's done.

An area for improvement that would really work out well would be if there were a little bit more of an elegant handshake relationship between SolarWinds RMM and the PCs that are being backed up, to advise regarding "up" status. We all expect servers to be on all the time; we never have a problem with servers. But when I look at my desktop status, using the color bars filter, I can see a dozen systems that haven't backed up in a while. Because of COVID, some of these systems may be off. It would be awesome if there was some sort of indication that the system is on, some sort of a "heartbeat" functionality, to see if the system is on. If the system hasn't reported in, that might be tied in with the heartbeat. But if it's tied in with the RMM, and the RMM is reporting that it's online and it's showing that it's failing, it should tell us online. Then we would see that it's failing and that it may need attention. 

And that would be more "glue" for sticking with SolarWinds or moving to SolarWinds, to have exactly that functionality.

Currently, what we have to do is swipe the name, copy it, put it into the RMM, do a quick search, and then I know it's offline. I have to do that with each one of them. That's the most time-consuming part of the solution. If they could improve that and provide a heartbeat, it would be an amazing, 100 percent solution.

Since RMM is an agent that feeds back that a machine is alive and on, I don't see any reason why they can't either tap into that one feature or build the same exact polling within the backup agent, to update right away and say the system is online or offline.

We transitioned over to SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery a little bit more than a year-and-a-half ago.

I founded this company in 1997. We are a small, mom and pop, white-glove, complete VIP, service for small businesses. We do anything and everything for our clients. Most of the clients are very in tune with our recommendations in terms of backups, various security measures, and solutions that we have in place.

Overall, it's very stable.

The only problem we come across is if a PC shuts down, reboots, and it's in a bit of a funk. In that situation, we stop the cryptographic and the backup service controller. We then start the cryptographic and the backup service controller. If it doesn't work, then there is a second step where we have to delete the indexing file and it will just redownload and recreate a new indexing file. It then syncs up with what's in the cloud and then continues the backup process.

It is very sensitive to System File Checker failing. We had six instances, with six different servers, where System File Checker was erroring out. It turned out that Trend Micro Worry-Free Services was causing the problem. After uninstalling and reinstalling Trend Micro, File Checker started working again. Because System File Checker was failing, it was not allowing us to back up. I don't know exactly how it does it, but it knows that System File Checker isn't working. We also had one instance, among those six servers, where System File Checker was failing and we had to do a DISM file system repair onsite. Once we did that, System File Checker ran successfully and the backup started working properly again.

It's sensitive to System File Checker which, by the way, is a natural alert, which is great. If it's failing and the first two resolution attempts don't work, we know to run System File Checker right away and make sure that it isn't failing. And if it is, I can stop trying all the other possibilities and resolve SFC error. 

But really that's the only issue. I've never had to uninstall or reinstall the solution. It just works. I put myself out there and I take my job extremely seriously. I wouldn't be with SolarWinds right now if I thought there was even a remote chance that this would not serve my needs when I need it. It's really that reliable.

The scalability is unlimited. If I had a million systems out there, using this solution would just involve the time it would take to provision them. After that I could bill nicely for it and it's really hands-off. 

As I mentioned, if I had a million systems, and all these systems were reporting failures because they were not turned on, that is the only issue I would have with the system because I wouldn't know what the status was of each of those machines. Maybe they have something to help with that and I just don't know it. But if it had the ability to let me know that this system last reported in on this day, that would be great.

We're a small shop. We have 100 systems, servers, and a few workstations in place right now.

SolarWinds' technical support for this solution is excellent. Phenomenal. They are just amazing. If you have to call them, you press "two" for technical support and, within half-a-minute, you've got somebody on the phone. It's very rare that you have to wait on the call. Their response rate is phenomenal. 

All the people are pretty good. Everyone tries their best. I've had some situations where it may have dragged out a little bit longer, but I've been in this business long enough to realize that some support people are going to have more experience and some are going to have less. Sometimes you wind up with one that has less because they're still learning the ropes and getting used to it. They may not be as versed and experienced in the world of computing. But it's a rarity.

We transitioned to this solution from eFolder. That was not nearly as good a solution as this is. The eFolder solution was a solution that works hand-in-hand with StorageCraft. We are a big StorageCraft client. They're our vendor for local backups. They serve the StorageCraft business community very well. 

SolarWinds is a different approach to backups. It's its own dedicated, proprietary solution. You load the agent and tell it to pull all files, folders, system state, SQL—whatever there is to back up.

Before we considered buying this solution we took about a month to test and evaluate the product, and it tested 100 percent. Each scenario—we restored a server, we restored a workstation, we restored a laptop—just worked. We said, "This is great, that's it. We're sold." That's the reason why we went with it.

Another factor was cost. SolarWinds is a major cost- and time-saver. The time-savings were even more important and, of course, also equate to money. It's a completely hands-off solution and there's no charge for the software, as one would expect. We just charge for storage. There is the option to buy storage and everything aggregates into one, if you need it to. But at the end of the day, it's a very profitable solution.

The setup is very simple. We have an Excel spreadsheet that we set up with the PC server name. We then have to create a code and provision it through the system. It provides you with an encryption key, which we document. We also set a GUI password so that if it were to be compromised, you click on it if you don't know the GUI password. That way there are two levels of encryption. There is one at the GUI level and another at the connection level, for establishing a backup and having it speak with the servers. 

When we provision or install the agent, we do everything using remote, background services on SolarWinds. We're never on-prem. We're never physically controlling the PC. Everything's done in the background. We do a silent install. We can see if the service has been created and when the service starts. Then we just finish up the provision and process. 

It's relatively simple. We have it down to a science: Silent installation, confirm services have started, stop the services, apply a policy, restart the services, log in using the GUI, kick off the backup, done.

To do the entire deployment, from start to finish, takes about 10 to 15 minutes per device. I do it myself because it's so quick.

I could train somebody to do it, of course, and there is the ability to create a template for the onboarding process. We're going to be doing that in our new PSA solution so that others can do it as well. But it's such an easy process. 

You can do it quicker because they have a feature—and I'm afraid to use it—where, if a client needs the solution installed on every machine, you can deploy it  as a self-provisioning installation process. It installs whatever it needs to install on all the systems. It can probably be done through a group policy. It's all documented. For anybody who has that type of scenario, it's super-easy.

The ROI depends. It's a very competitive market out there. But because we're hands-on with our clients and we're monitoring this, and there's not much to monitor—I only spend about five minutes a day on it—from a cost perspective, our ROI is anywhere between 300 and 700 percent profit.

Pricing is per GB. If you're backing up workstations, they provide you 100 GBs. If they are doing servers, they provide you 500 GBs right off the bat. But that's all aggregated for us, as an MSP. So the more clients we have, the more they're adding to the amount of space we have available for the entire client base. We wind up not ever having to pay overages and we wind up being able to grow into the amount of storage that becomes available.

Because we were moving away from another solution and had a decent amount of data that we were going to be backing up, I was able to negotiate a very good rate. There is flexibility. The rate that they presented was reasonable. It worked out that I got locked into a great rate. It made it easier for me to sell the product based on the fact that I get a lower rate.

There are so many different backup solutions that are out there, but when it comes to ease of use, it's hard to even look at anything else.

If you want to go through the motions of testing it, I get it. You have to do your own due diligence. But I've done the homework and it works. And if you have a RAID drive and you need a RAID controller driver, you can actually insert the RAID controller driver into the boot media so that it saves the volume. And it will just work.

We use a neat feature called Virtual Disaster Recovery (VDR) status. It only works on servers. I believe it's $5 a month to do recovery testing and it's certainly worthwhile. We even bill out for that, and having that feature built-in is making us money. It's automated. Once or twice a month it will virtually mount the backup and provide a screenshot and advise whether or not there have been any errors. 

Some of our clients' servers are very big, so the VDR process will be completed with errors. I've since been told that's because they've got very large volumes. If the volume is larger than one terabyte, they're not going to mount it, probably because of resources and to make it economically affordable to do a test. But most C-drive partitions, which is the system partition, are short of a terabyte. Most of our clients will have one terabyte or less for these partitions. What this feature does is provide you with a verification result and shows you a screenshot. 

It mounts the operating system, provides you with logging, and reports an error if a volume is too large. And I'm okay with that. The whole verification process, to make sure that the integrity is there, works out-of-the-box. The VDR status functionality, which is an add-on—you have to add each service to it—gives you peace of mind that the data is mountable and that you're good to go. That peace of mind is enough for me to go about my day and do whatever I have to do. It works.

If it reports an error, that's because the volume might be two, three, four, or five terabytes in size. As a result, they're not going to be mounting that.

It would take a long time. We would need resources and the type of an environment to be able to download the tens of terabytes that we have for clients. We didn't want to be out of compliance when downloading that locally on our network. We don't have the resources to be able to store that kind of data locally. Everything's cloud-based now. The option to do so is certainly there, but we don't do it because that's what the VDR testing does for us. It's a major time-saver because it's already being done by them when you elect to do it on a particular server.

You enable VDR recovery testing, choose once a month or bi-monthly, and you're done. The next time it's scheduled to run, it runs. You can see the history and the status. It's very easy. There's nothing to set up.

If you do Office365, which we're going to be embracing, SolarWinds seems to be the leader with Office365 backup, or at least they're dominating the market with advertisements. I feel good that I'm using a product for both backups and for Office365.

The Virtual Drive also looks pretty cool. I've never used it, but I could see how it would be cool. I'd have to find out whether that's something we can just install on a server and, if we need it, it would be there and allow us to restore a file right away without even having to log in to the Backup Manager. That would give us direct access to the files as if it were a regular file system. And they do support that functionality. 

The Recovery Console has worked, 100 percent. I used to do recoveries that way for each of the clients, but it would take a long time for downloading. That's why they introduced the Virtual Disaster Recovery testing. I don't use the Recovery Console anymore to test backups. If it tests in the cloud, I trust it will test fine if we were to download it.

I try to embrace the SolarWinds solutions as much as possible. They've served me and my company and my clients well. For servers, first and foremost, it's just a rock-solid solution. The restorability is excellent. We've had very few problems. And usually, if there's a problem, it's not on their end, it has to do with the server itself.