N-able Cove Data Protection Reviews

Our primary use case is for offsite backup of our client's and our data. We use it to backup files & folders, Exchange, and SQL databases. If  you need to do a disaster recovery, it has the option to restore your system to a VHD. If a customer has an issue that they just need some files or folders restored, or their SQL database, or a single email restore, you have the flexibility to restore whatever you need to. We can go down to item level if we need to.

SolarWind's reliability has improved our organization as we can offer a reliable backup solution to our customers. We have customers who were with other companies who were using a different backup solution, and when it came time to restore their files they were unable to restore what they were supposed to be backing up. We have never had that issue with all the times and situations that we have had to restore data. We have had no problems or issues.

In terms of its efficiency of resource and bandwidth use, we usually schedule our backups to be done after normal business hours when there is less network traffic and bandwidth is usually better. The backups don't take long at all as only the changed data from the previous backup is transferred. With the archiving feature, you can go back to any archive and restore what you need to from that backup.

I've been in IT for over 40 years, and I've tested and tried about every backup solution out there. The thing about SolarWinds backup, is that if they say it backed it up successfully, I know confidently that the data is safe and will be able to be restored if needed. The reliability and the confidence that we have in this product is extremely high. We've had customers have ransomware, data corruption, employees destroy their data, and as long as it's been backed up, I know that we can get it restored back and I know we have nothing to worry about.  

I would rate their ease of use a nine and a half out of ten. It's super easy, very intuitive, and it's very well done. They have a great product.

The standalone and the RMM are priced differently and each have their own dashboard. Once you load from either dashboard into the software, the software itself is the same. This makes backup operations great. It's so easy to manage and you can do it all from within each dashboard. The difference between the 2 models is one is priced per MB and one is per device.

The speed of the restore is dependent on the configuration. With their solution, you can just store it in the Cloud or you can store it in the Cloud and have a local speed vault. The local speed vault is a NAS, SAN, or mapped network storage on the local network. If you have a local speed vault, your restore is going to be as fast as your network is, or as good as your internet connection if you're restoring from the Cloud. They push it up and down as fast as you have a pipe for. There is really no latency in terms of software, and any slowness is going to be from your hardware or your internet connection.

Cloud storage is nice because a lot of places have local backup. Cloud backup also gives you an offsite location that if something happens to your physical site, someone forgets to put a tape in, or your place burns down, you lose all your stuff. The Cloud gives you a secondary place to backup to.

We've never even had to consider anything else for any situation for our customers. It restores well. It's hard to say anything about improvement because we're just so happy with it. Their support people are second to none. 

The one thing that could use some improvement is their Linux backup. Their Linux backup us a files/folders backup and you are not able to to a system restore. I have another product that I use for our Linux servers, but it would be nice if they had that flexibility on the Linux side. 

We have been using SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery for six years. We're using the standalone version as well as the RMM version, which are basically the same. The RMM version is integrated into their RMM package. 

In terms of stability, it runs. We were using it on a 2003 Exchange server and it runs on that. We've got it on an XP machine. We're running a lot of 2019 SQLs and 2019 Exchanges. It runs from top to bottom. It just runs. The only problem that comes up from time to time - but I don't feel it's under their control - is when you are backing up a workstation. The problem is when we're backing up a workstation, and there's a Windows update that comes down, it will shut their backup service off. It will then do the Windows updates, but won't turn that service back on unless the workstation is rebooted or the service is manually started.

 I don't think that's an issue of theirs but that's something that we're aware of. 

Solarwinds backup support guys are second to none! They are the best!  They are a great bunch of guys that are always great to talk to.

We used Vembu for a while until we had one instance where they couldn't restore the data that they said they backed up. We had Remote Backup Systems for a while and we ran into a problem with them not being able to restore data for a customer. We used Symantec backup for many years as a local backup, but only RBS and Vembu for Cloud and offsite. We have used Acronis, Veritas Backup Exec, Veeam, Arcserve, Symantec, as well as others over the years. We switched to SolarWinds because their cloud backup as well as local storage option coupled with their reliability was something that worked all the time along with no consumable or physical media issues you have with the other solutions. Since we had several bad experiences with not being able to restore data for customers when they needed it, we needed to find a solution that we could count on 100% of the time. There doesn't have to be any other reasons other than that. 

The initial setup was straightforward. You create your customer in your dashboard,  you right-click and add your device, give your device a name, and deploy it. It's so simple. From the RMM you can create an installation package that has all the client's info and then just run it. It has all the encryption and Cloud information in it. You just click "Create My Installer," it creates the installer, you copy that to the customer site, you run it and you don't even answer anything in that one. It has it all in there from the dashboard. 

From beginning to end, the deployment takes five minutes. 

We have definitely seen a great ROI on our Solarwinds backup solution.

Pricing-wise on the standalone is fair. The problem is that their RMM package is priced per device. Each device is allowed 500GB storage for $XX.XX. It's been like that for the past six years since we've been with them. If you go back five, six, seven years ago, 500GB was a lot, but as times change storage has increased. Operating systems are taking up more disk space, programs are taking up more disk space, updates are taking up more disk space, and people are storing more data. I know the storage (disk & cloud) part of it has gotten cheaper over the past six years, but the amount of storage you are allowed per device hasn't changed - it is still the same as it was six years ago. I'm not saying that they need to lower their per device fee, but I think it would be nice to see them allow more storage per device for that monthly per device fee.

Their pricing is still fair. Are they the cheapest? No. Are there other products out there that are as reliable as them? Probably somewhere, some product, but I'm not willing to take that chance because we developed a comfort level and we know if our customers get get corrupt data, need a deleted file restored, or get ransomware, we can get all their data back. That's where it's at. 

There aren't additional costs. You have your per device - you're allowed up to X amount and then you have overage charges, whatever per-gig over that you are. The billing is pretty straight up. If you have a stand-alone, it's however much all your clients are backing up by X amount, that's your bill.  As far as the billing, that's all pretty straightforward.

We looked at many different options as previously mentioned.  As far as ease of use, we looked at Veeam. Veeam is a nice product, but it is expensive. We also looked at the Barracuda backup solution, but that requires a physical appliance at each client's location. We've had two customers that were using a competitor's backup solution where they couldn't restore their data. We just don't have that problem with SolarWinds. for our customers that are concerned about internet/cloud restore speed, we just configure them with a local speedvault.

Everyone knows that the good backups and a good backup plan are the only safe haven from ransomware. If you've got a good backup, you don't have to worry about anything and that's where we're at. We've had three clients now in the past three months who had ransomware but were back up in no time with no data loss. 

Reliability and ease of use are was distinguish SolarWinds. 

I know there are a lot of companies out there that it's hard to switch from what you're doing. I would be willing to sit in a room with people that have evaluated as much as I have in terms of backup products over the years and talk and round table with them. 

I feel that SolarWinds had some issues with their per device charge and how much you are allowed with their RMM product, but as far as their backup products, they are rock solid. We've had no issues. None. I realize the backup is just part of their RMM thing, but that is the one part that there's just no question about.

Their product is reliable, easy to use, and fairly priced. It's not the cheapest, so if you're looking for the cheapest, then SolarWinds is not it. If you're looking for a quality solution that lets you sleep at night, knowing that you're not worried about your backup, your customer's backup, anything like that; I would definitely say, this is something you should really investigate and look into.

I would rate SolarWinds MSP Backup Recovery a ten 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.

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

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

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

The most valuable aspect is the added protection of having a cloud-based backup service. It provides redundancy in case of data loss. The fact that it includes backup, disaster recovery, and archiving is very important for the assurance that there is another source of data retention and for data restoration in case of a disaster.

Also, the reputation of the vendor and the assurance that the data would be spread across multiple servers are important.

A feature I'd like to see would be a more customizable admin console.

I've been using N-able Cove Data Protection for about a year.

The stability of this solution is very good.

The scalability is also very good.

Their technical support is very good. I have contacted them a few times concerning some issues and have always received prompt and adequate service.

Positive

I used to use Acronis, but I made the switch because Cove Data Protection provides me with a central console.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just configure the client in the admin console and deploy an executable that initiates backup. It takes just one person.

The only maintenance is continually monitoring the backups to make sure that they are continuously successful.

The pricing is very competitive and it's well worth the price.

I evaluated StorageCraft at the same time and I chose this one because of the central admin console and the way the imaging backups work on this service.

Cove Data Protection doesn't reduce the time or the resources needed for administration but it is comparable with other solutions.

N-able Cove Data Protection should be an essential part of any IT structure.

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 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. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are just a customer and an end-user.

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

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

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

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

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

Our primary use case is for all of our backup needs for the companies that we support throughout our area. Anybody who's looking for some sort of a trusted offsite backup solution, this is what our lead product is. It supports all bare-metal, offsite, cloud replication, the whole deal.

SolarWinds has improved my organization due to the way that we've been able to recover and not have any problems or issues within recovery. This has been key in making sure that we can get our clients back up working correctly, as well as making sure that the data is recoverable at any point in time.

It has reduced the amount of time that we spend on a day-to-day basis, as far as the admin side of the backup. We've probably been able to save a couple of hours per day, making sure that everything is working and working correctly the first time.

It has also reduced recovery times, as well as backup to the cloud itself. We've been looking at the recovery times. We have been able to save around eight to 10 hours per recovery, around an hour or two per week. And then as far as backup goes, we've been able to save around four to five hours. 

The most valuable feature is the recovery piece itself. Our ability to recover full systems correctly and properly the first time is what makes SolarWinds our most important piece.

The overall ease of use is fantastic. We have people who have very little knowledge who we've been able to teach how to do recoveries. Making things work has been very easy for us.

It provides a single dashboard for all types of data protection, we monitor everything through a single dashboard. It simplifies everything overall. It allows us to see everything, whether passing or failing any issues, any problems through a single pane of glass that we don't have to click through or adjust as we go forward.

We've noticed no difference between managing a simple or a complex backup or recovery, which is another reason why we liked the product so much. There have been no problems or changes as far as speed goes. We think that it's definitely an adequate or amount of time to recover those situations.

The efficiency of the resource and bandwidth use when it comes to both backup and recovery has been excellent at this point. We have not noticed any problems, issues, or changes within bandwidth and our ability to manipulate the amount of bandwidth that's taken at any point in time is another great feature.

The cloud storage feature has made us much more efficient, as well as profitable because of the ways that the software changes and deduplicates the amount of storage that is used at any point in time.

The reporting feature and functionality need improvement. We would like to see a little bit more detailed reporting that offers more CEO or C-level focused reporting options.

We have been using SolarWinds Backup and Recovery for roughly four years. 

I am very impressed with the stability. I haven't seen any problems or issues as far as corruption, stability, or anything along those lines.

It's very scalable and very friendly as far as scalability goes. It allows us to use whatever hardware we like and work in a variety of different situations.

Internally, we have about five or six dedicated technicians that we have using the solution. They are fully responsible for all deployment and maintenance.

In our organization, SolarWinds is used very extensively. All new backup opportunities go through and are sold as the SolarWinds Backup Recovery product.

Before SolarWinds, we used Barracuda Backups. The biggest reasons we switched to SolarWinds are because of the price, flexibility, and scalability.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was very easy to use, very easy to understand, to sell, and to maintain.

We spent around a day or two learning how to back up, how things worked, how things got onsite/offsite. Then, just over time, we are continuing to look at ways to improve so, we spend a couple of hours per month learning new ways of doing things.

Our initial strategy was based on a cost-competitive situation and we were looking at something that was straightforward, easy to use, but also relatively inexpensive. This fit the bill for what we were looking to do. The strategy was to provide an offsite backup solution that would work for a client, in terms of a tape backup.

We had done the deployment ourselves. Any help that we needed, we got directly from SolarWinds. They were very good, very easy, and very willing to help. They're still very willing to help as we work through any hiccups or things that we see that are abnormal.

We have seen ROI. When we get a much more quick and scalable solution where everything works. We have been able to definitely increase our profitability within that.

We're about 40 or 50% more profitable than we were before.

The total cost of ownership given the inclusion of cloud storage and the absence of proprietary appliances has been great so far. The costs that they have in place are very fair and very justifiable.

The best thing about the SolarWinds solution is the ability to price or scale on a case by case basis. You're not buying into a full block of how many licenses you need. You're not signing up into a contract where you have to buy so many licenses, which has been great for us so.

If you're looking at doing a local storage device, then that is a one-time cost that you usually source from a third-party. They're outside of the initial software costs. There's nothing else that goes along with it.

The only solutions we looked at were Barracuda and Symantec Tape Backup solution. It wasn't very competitive. For Barracuda, the biggest pro for us at the time was our experience with it. We've worked with them for a number of years and a couple of different opportunities and situations. The con was the pricing. Then it was also the scalability where we were able to look at something that would allow us to grow along with the product versus having to buy an expensive piece of hardware. For Symantec Backup Exec, it was a pretty easy situation where it's either an onsite tape backup or an offsite cloud-based, more secure solution.

If you're looking for something that's going to be easy to use, cost-effective, but also provides a great backup and more importantly, a recovery solution, this is definitely something that you should look at and keep in mind. It's a great product. It works very well and I don't have to worry about if a backup is working or not.

Make sure that you don't undersize things. It's okay to oversize a local storage device. It's easier to come and oversell the opportunity or the option versus underselling it.

I would rate SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery a nine out of 10. I'd give it a 10 if we had a little bit better reporting. For the functionality and the feature set within it, I would give it a 10.