NAKIVO Backup & Replication Reviews

My primary use case for NAKIVO revolves around its efficient backup and replication capabilities for virtual machines within our environment. 

We operate in a dynamic IT landscape, serving several dozen clients with varying needs. NAKIVO's flexibility is paramount; we can seamlessly deploy it either on a NAS or as a virtual machine on the host, accommodating the diverse setups of our clients. 

In our environment, ensuring data integrity and availability is critical. NAKIVO's ability to back up entire virtual machines automatically, along with timely notifications, serves as a pivotal time-saving mechanism for us. We leverage its features extensively for routine backups and replication tasks, enabling us to maintain data redundancy and disaster recovery preparedness across our infrastructure. 

Moreover, NAKIVO's user-friendly interface and straightforward reports streamline our operations. Quick access to support staff and a comprehensive knowledge base further enhance our experience, ensuring any issues or queries are promptly addressed. 

While NAKIVO excels in meeting our backup needs, we've encountered challenges with version compatibility and collaboration between NAKIVO and QNAP, our chosen storage solution. Additionally, the discontinuation of the "Basic" license has posed some concerns for smaller clients within our portfolio. Nevertheless, NAKIVO remains our go-to solution due to its affordability, reliability, and effectiveness in safeguarding our virtualized environment. 

Whether it's restoring entire virtual machines or ensuring seamless data protection, NAKIVO continues to play a pivotal role in our IT strategy.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication has significantly improved our organization's data management and disaster recovery capabilities. By implementing NAKIVO, we've experienced several key benefits that have positively impacted our operations.

Firstly, NAKIVO has streamlined our backup processes by providing a simple yet powerful solution for backing up entire virtual machines. Its flexibility in deployment options, whether on a NAS or as a virtual machine, has allowed us to adapt to the diverse needs of our clients efficiently. This adaptability has not only simplified our setup procedures but also enhanced our ability to meet specific client requirements. 

Secondly, NAKIVO's automatic backup and replication features have saved us valuable time and resources. The ability to schedule backups and receive notifications ensures that our critical data is consistently protected without manual intervention. This automation has significantly reduced the burden on our IT staff, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks to drive business growth. 

Moreover, NAKIVO's robust security measures have instilled confidence in our data protection strategy. We have consistently managed to restore virtual machines without any issues, ensuring business continuity in the face of potential disasters or data loss incidents. 

However, while NAKIVO Backup & Replication has brought many improvements to our organization, it hasn't been without its challenges. We've encountered difficulties with version compatibility and experienced delays in updates, particularly concerning collaboration between NAKIVO and QNAP. 

Additionally, the discontinuation of the "Basic" license has posed challenges for smaller clients within our client base, impacting our ability to cater to their needs effectively. 

Overall, despite these challenges, NAKIVO Backup & Replication has significantly improved our organization by enhancing data protection, streamlining backup processes, and saving time and resources. Its effectiveness in safeguarding our critical data has made it an indispensable part of our IT infrastructure, contributing to our overall resilience and success.

The most valuable features of NAKIVO Backup & Replication for our organization are its flexibility in deployment options, automatic backup and replication capabilities, and robust security measures. 

Firstly, the flexibility to install NAKIVO either on a NAS or as a virtual machine on the host provides us with versatile deployment options, accommodating the varied setups of our clients efficiently. This flexibility streamlines our setup procedures and enables us to meet specific client requirements with ease. 

Secondly, the automatic backup and replication features are invaluable, saving us time and resources by automating routine backup tasks and ensuring data protection without manual intervention. The ability to schedule backups and receive notifications enhances our data protection strategy, contributing to business continuity. 

Lastly, NAKIVO's robust security measures instill confidence in our data protection efforts. With the assurance that we can consistently restore virtual machines without issues, we can mitigate risks effectively and maintain data integrity across our infrastructure. 

Overall, these features combine to provide a comprehensive and reliable solution for our backup and replication needs, enhancing our organization's resilience and data management capabilities.

While NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers valuable features, there are areas for improvement needed. Firstly, addressing compatibility issues and streamlining collaboration with storage solutions like QNAP would enhance the product's reliability. 

Additionally, improving the process of transferring configurations between versions would reduce administrative overhead and ensure smoother transitions. In terms of additional features for the next release, incorporating more advanced reporting capabilities would provide deeper insights into backup status and performance metrics. 

Enhanced support for virtualized environments, such as integration with hypervisor-specific features or support for emerging virtualization technologies, would further bolster the product's versatility and appeal to a wider range of users. 

Moreover, implementing more comprehensive data deduplication and compression techniques could optimize storage utilization and reduce backup times, improving overall efficiency. 

Finally, enhancing disaster recovery functionalities, such as faster recovery times and more granular recovery options, would strengthen the product's value proposition in ensuring business continuity and resilience.

I've used the solution for three years.

We are using Nakivo for our primary backup, replication, and recovery for our environment. 

We create bare metal recovery backups for if/when we have a server that goes down. We also back up all of our databases, servers, and log files for Microsoft. We use Nakivo at multiple locations for all our backups, replications, and recovery. We back up locations to other locations so we have an off-site disaster recovery plan in place. We are currently using an Essentials Pro license and are doing an on-premise solution.

Nakivo has drastically improved our organization. We needed to minimize the impact of ransomware incidents on our business continuity and ensure that our data was easily recoverable. Nakivo backup, recovery, and replication have made that possible and easy. The product is easy to manage for any IT person who is new to backup, recovery, and replication. The product is also easy to implement whether you are doing on-premise or cloud. Reporting tool has been nice for getting email updates on backup jobs and any kind of failures. 

One of the most valuable features of Nakivo that we have been using for the last six years is the whole system backup. It works the best out of so many different applications we have looked into, without a doubt. 

The ease of use website, reliability, email notifications if the job is successful or unsuccessful, and performance have all been top-notch for us. 

It uses all the bandwidth available, if not limited, and backs up entire servers with all data faster than a lot of other backup software out there. 

As far as features, there really is not anything we need right now. 

The only thing I could say is maybe some more options for job scheduling are needed. As of right now, we can only schedule incremental and full backups. However, there are no differential backup features in the same job. 

The speed to do backups now is okay, yet if there was a way to increase the speed at encrypting or compressing would be nice. And, of course, if Nakivo just keeps updating its product, then we are happy. 

I've used the solution for six years.

The system is very stable. Most problems have been from other systems.

The scalability is really good.

From support to account management, there is always someone available to help with either renewals or support of the product. I have had to reach out to support a couple of times for issues or help, and there has been someone available immediately and able to help me quickly.

Positive

We switched products since we needed something easier to manage and set up and something more reliable. Nakivo has been all that for us.

The setup was straightforward, and support was there every step of the way. 

We implemented the setup in-house with Nakivo support who was very helpful every step of the way.

The software is well-balanced with respect to the features it offers. It has easily solved our problems. It has amortized by one hundred percent.

When we were looking into different solutions, the overall cost at the time was very attractive. Nakivo can be installed on Qnap NAS - which is more price friendly.

We evaluated Barracuda and Veeam.

The product is easy to manage for any IT person who is new to backup. The product is also easy to implement whether you are doing on-premise or cloud. The support team is always helpful and responds quickly.

As a software house, we make heavy use of the VMware vSphere environment for hosting our test lab along with the software repositories and other data.

There are some software repositories, file shares, and a VMware vSphere environment with about 60 virtual machines (few transient but the majority evolving), all weighing in at around 3.4 TB of data to backup.

Our data is mostly NAS-centric so we need a comprehensive solution to back up our NAS, possibly without allocating an additional instance of operating system and related hardware.

It is also necessary to make local and offsite backup copies of our data without recurring, if possible, scripting.

Nakivo permits easy installation natively on a NAS and has a low-impact footprint for needed resources. It can be quickly configured via web pages.

It is strongly oriented to backup VMware vSphere environments yet permits us also to protect data based on CIFS (Microsoft SMB) shares, thus covering our needs.

We can protect our environment by backing up data to local, offsite, and Amazon storage - making use of backup and copy jobs offered natively by Nakivo.

After an initial configuration and calibration work, the software now works successfully.

It can be installed natively on NAS appliances (it supports Qnap and other kinds of NAS) permitting the use of underutilized appliances without installing the software on Windows or Linux Servers.

The solution has frugal resource needs.

We can backup natively our VMware Virtual Machines and File Shares.

We can store backups (or make copies of them) onto Microsoft shares, Amazon S3, (which is ultimately on more economical Backblaze), and remotely to other sites using their little transporter VM.

Jobs can be chained one after the other to not overload the system with overlapping jobs or to start a backup copy job after its relative backup has ended.

We have rapid add/remove/reorder priority of VM to backup and their backup archive.

Nakivo Service is very helpful and pretty fast to respond (about 1-2 days).

We would like to back up File Shares to Amazon S3/Wasabi.

Email notifications should allow for the subject to be customizable and permit the use of some predefined variables (like {JOBNAME}, {DATETIME}, {JOBRESULT}) that will be substituted when mail is sent.

The backup view of a repository could be adjusted. In addition to the Name, Job, and Size columns, it would also be useful to see the number of recovery points for each object and the backup type for each row.

The backup view of a VM repository is necessary. If you have several protected virtual machines, you have correspondingly different pages to navigate to reach a specific VM. After entering the detail view of a backup, when you click "<" on the page, you are returned to the first page of the repository instead of being returned to the nth page you were on before. Alternatively, having a field where you set the number of rows to show would help.

Also, with the backup view of a VM repository, it would be nice to have a tooltip showing the summary data of the backup you are hovering over (or by clicking the hyperlink).

I've been using the solution for more than four months.

Previously we use MicroFocus VM Explorer (formerly Trilead VM Explorer).

Upgrading the vSphere platform makes VM Explorer no more able to support new environments. Further, we need a more comprehensive backup solution.

The setup of the software is simple and rapid.

The price is reasonable for our needs and with respect to the features offered.

We looked at Acronis Cyber Protect and Altaro VM Backup.

We use the solution to backup just one virtual machine running at VMware ESXi 5.5/6.0. The backup is made according to the planned schedule, e-mail notification after the success or errors were OK. Weekly reports can be enabled too.

VMware servers are at ten offices in different locations. Nakivo B&R is running at Qnap NAS with different models - TS-251A/TS-X53II/TS-X51/TS-269 - all with two disks in Raid, and 2GB or 4GB RAM is needed. Recovery is simple and quite fast for my VMs which are about 100GB in disk volume.

One instance Nakivo B&R has connected 2 ESXi hosts.

Nakivo B&R is running at Qnap NAS and is an optimal low cost solution an offers a free version for one year. There are reports for email and deduplication for saving storage space. 

It's easy to configure connections to ESXi and set backup jobs (or recoveries) with  a schedule. There is an option to copy the backup to another ESXi host.

Deduplication makes increasing backup jobs really fast and reduces the required storage.

Qnap offers a lot of collaboration solutions for a small office and Nakivo minimally affects the system load. However, in a few models, TS-231P/TS-431X, you have to run Transporter as a VM at ESXi host - which is not simple to do.

Nakivo B&R can be used with the free version of ESX. It has own build in Director and Transporter (or Transporter running as virtual machine at ESXi host). ESXi doesn't have built-in data protection, so almost all other software needs to be VMware licensed 

Managing everything via the web is really simple.

In models TS-231P/TS-431X you have to run Transporter as VM at ESXi host - which is not simple to do. Deploying the VM from Nakivo B&R's web console always crushes with time expired. Of course, you can download Transporter_Repository.ova and import it directly to ESXi, then you need to configure it manually and add/connect in Nakivo. The VM Transporter_Repository.ova needs to configure the IP Address. Transporter Onboard (at Qnap) doesn't need an IP Address.

I've no other needs. The free version covers my security completely.

I've used the solution for more than two years.

I've used Unitrends,VMware, and Veeam.

If you have 1-5 VMs at ESXi, then the free license for one year is a great choice.

I did not evaluate other options.

We use the solution with VMware virtual servers starting from Windows 2008 to Windows 2023, Virtual Station Windows 10 and Windows 11, UNIX, and Linux.

The solution offers reliable copying and fast recovery.

This product is worth the money and does the job perfectly. I’ve already had to restore several times and I do test restorations every month.

I recommend it to everyone. It is a proven product for a small fee.

The product offers reliable copying, replication, and fast recovery.

The product needs to improve backup speed and replication speed.

I've used the solution for four years.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is super easy.

I did not need customer service.

Positive

I used Veeam before, however, it is much more expensive. That said, it does the same thing.

The initial setup is easy and fast.

We worked with a vendor team that was 100% helpful in their expertise. 

The ROI is all right.

The solution is cheap and licensing is clear.

We use this software to back up all of our servers, databases, and log files as well as create bare metal recovery backups incase a server fails. 

When a server has failed in the past, Nakivo's been a great help as it's able to restore an entire operating system with its configuration and files basically everything. Therefore, when a server failed we simply wiped the drive and restored everything via Nakivo and haven't had a single problem. We've never had a restore operation fail on us due to a corrupted backup. 

This amazing software is highly recommended. We also use it on our Hyper-V environment and it's able to restore directly into Hyper-V and start the VM with no configuration required afterwards as it's a 1:1 replica of the server.

Nakivo improved our backup environment as it added yet another backup for us to have. 

We use multiple backup software like the Windows Server backup, EaseUS TODO Backup, and SQL SMSS DB Backup including other third-party backup software dedicated for their software. 

Nakivo's able to do everything these programs can do and is able to work with NAS shares, SMB shares, and many others. The best part about it is when we've ever tried to restore to verify the backups we've never had a problem in the four years and we regularly verify the backups every three months.

One of the most valuable features we've been using is the whole system backup. It works the best out of so many different applications without a doubt. The ease of use management server website, reliability, email notifications if the job is unsuccessful (and successful), and the performance are top-notch. It uses all the bandwidth available if not limited and backs up entire servers with all data about four times faster than Windows Server Backup and EaseUS TODO Backup.

One of the things I liked least about this software is when an update was pushed to one of the servers we had, somehow we didn't receive the update and needed some quick troubleshooting. That said, the customer service team was able to help out within the hour and was amazing and very helpful from the first reply. Like you cant go wrong with their customer support team. If you have a problem, an inquiry, or just a general question about what you can do or how else you can incorporate it they will answer your question to your satisfaction within the first two replies - unlike a lot of other support teams that just follow scripts and procedures, these guys get right down to the point from the first email.

I've used the solution for about four years.

We verify backups every 3 months and have never had a single problem with them over four years. They are highly dependable.

The product is 100% the best in terms of scaling. It offers high-speed transfers for both restores and backups and doesn't congest networks even without bandwidth throttling.

They reply with a useful answer within the first two emails from starting the case. They are very knowledgeable people and don't follow a useless script like many big companies.

Positive

We used the Windows Server Backup which was unreliable.

We also used the Easeus TODO Backup, which had lots of failed backups due to files in the network sharing in the same folder as the backup job (previous backups causing errors).

The setup is very straightforward once you figure out what needs to be done.

The solution doesn't require that many resources for the actual virtual machine/dedicated server for its software. It is very efficiently designed and has very high performance without congesting the network.

Windows Server Backup - Unreliable but came with windows so assumed it should be able to get the job done but lots of corrupted backups when trying to verify integrity.

Easeus TODO Backup - Lots of failed backups due to files in network share in the same folder as the backup job (previous backups causing errors) other than that no problems with it. lots of cool functions too but nakivo offers everything plus extra.

I recommend this software for any medium to large businesses. It offers very good integrity of backups.

We're using Nakivo primarily for backup, replication, and recovery. It helps us back up our databases and files in Microsoft or other OS types. There are other features we don't use, like multi-environment management. 

In the future, we might use some of the features they've added in the latest edition, like VM monitoring. I discussed this option today with one of our partners, and they said you could consolidate tools instead of buying another solution for VM monitoring tools. That way, you can manage two solutions from one console. However, we only need backup replication for our current infrastructure needs. We have not used the multi-site capabilities because we have no current demand.

All our customers give the same feedback on Nakivo. They tell us they appreciate the user-friendly interface and the space savings they realize from Nakivo's compression. The slick interface, low price, and compression are valuable for us. 

Nakivo's reporting features have helped a lot. They give my boss high visibility into what's going on, which is crucial because we had a data breach in the past where we lost about 12 years of data. That's why we bought several appliances, and we replicate the same backup twice a day to three different depositories. 

Nakivo is fast and user-friendly. Compression over Othernet is the best feature, and Nakivo's object-level restoration is also excellent. All the features are well designed, work properly, and meet our needs, and there are some extra features that we don't use.

Some of Nakivo's backup features need improvement. For example, I would like some more options for job scheduling. We can only schedule incremental and full backup, but there are no differential backup features in the same job. I can only schedule one incremental and one full backup in a week. 

I schedule three jobs for each repository, which is the simplest way to plan your jobs. It's possible to consolidate three jobs into one, but when you want to explain the backup registration schema to someone, they can't understand what they don't see. When you schedule some jobs, you should be able to see a list of the jobs contained within each. You have to open up the editor to see what is inside. You must click through and edit stuff. Each time, it asks you to save or discard changes. It's very annoying. You only see the name of the scheduled job, and you need to edit it to see what's it's inside.

I am a Nakivo regional reseller, and I've been using this product since 2015.

Nakivo is highly stable. In the past six years, I've never had a backup fail. It can sometimes happen, but only if you run out of space. 

You can scale up just by paying for more licenses. There are options. For example, if you buy a new server, you need extra licenses, and when you purchase an additional license, you must buy another month for the previous license. The scalability is flexible. One of our clients has 12 circuits, but we sell six circuits for each on average.

We had a big problem where we didn't know what happened to our clients' servers, but we ultimately realized it was a problem on our side. Overall, Nakivo's support was fast. They instantly respond via call or via email.

The backup and replication method for most solutions is the same. For example, Nakivo and Veeam are similar, but Veeam has many options we will never use, and we get a lot of questions about features customers don't need.

It's more complicated to perform the same jobs using Veritas, which is designed for huge companies, like telecoms and multinational companies. It's more of an enterprise solution, so the price is much higher.

The deployment process is about the same for any client because some features are grayed out when you have a licensed product. The specific installation and deployment process depends on the licensing, but the basic menus are the same. You can buy Nakivo online and start using it in less than an hour. 

I took two or three different training courses to learn how to use Nakivo. They were helpful. We have several engineers involved in deploying and maintaining the solution, but their jobs are mixed. We don't have one designated person who handles backup solutions.

However, Nakivo handles most of the maintenance on our ongoing projects. For example, if you make a backup, Nakivo will check the integrity of your data. It's a valuable feature. 

A backup and replication solution is an essential investment for most businesses. If you're using replication, you don't need to spend money on testing infrastructure, so Nakivo will save you about 60 percent on testing costs. 

Nakivo's licensing is straightforward compared to some other vendors who make purchasing hard. Nakivo's licensing is flexible. If your infrastructure changes or you have some new needs, you can find the cheapest price. 

I rate Nakivo 10 out of 10. The two major advantages of going with Nakivo are support and price. We work with mid-sized companies, and these are their primary concerns. 

We are using Nakivo for backing up multiple Virtual Machines hosted over ESXi hosts in various locations.

The hosts vary from 6.0 to 6.7 and previously we had Nakivo running for 5.5 hosts as well, which have since been dismissed.

When we started, we had also older 4.1 hosts which were covered by a special transporter used for legacy systems.

Since then, we have performed various upgrades to both the ESXi hosts, and Nakivo always worked flawlessly. It becomes better with each upgrade. 

For us, the capability of using Nakivo with the un-licensed version of ESXi is the biggest selling point.

The ease of use and the intuitive interface are also quite nice, and the various upgrades from Nakivo's side are great.

The UI has been reworked from the 9.x to the 10.x version and the new one is really good.

Thanks to Nakivo, we were able to perform a disaster recovery procedure during early 2021, losing little to no data, and the only thing slowing us down during the recovery was the speed of the new host.

The ability to backup Virtual Machines on the un-licensed version of ESXi is the main selling point for us.

The backups, especially of the incremental type, are really quick (ranging from five to 10 to 45 to 50 minutes depending on the size of the VM).

The recoveries are also quite quick, of course, depending on the host system. Generally, it recovers over the network and does not take more than an hour, again, depending on various factors unrelated to Nakivo.

The ability to retrieve individual files from a backup is a welcome plus which we discovered and found pretty useful.

Personally, I would like to have the ability to backup older legacy systems on the new versions as well.

I'd like the ability to perform individual backups (so a backup from inside the system instead of on the host side) - which right now is limited to newer Operating Systems, which, while is a good thing from a security point of view. That said, sometimes there is an older machine or VM which could use backups like this.

For our usage, we've found the connections to remote shares (like CIFS or NFS) while quite easy to set up are a little bit prone to interruption. Of course, in the next availability check performed autonomously by Nakivo, the connection is restored. This could of course be a problem with the destination share, however, it's really the only "issue" we've had with this software.

I've used the solution since 2018.

The stability of the software is great; we've never had a problem with it or with the updates.

The customer support is awesome and the support service is also great and quite qualified.

We don't have much experience with them as we had to contact them just once for clarification and not a real problem. 

Positive

Previously we had a custom backup procedure. We switched due to the impracticality of maintaining that system and the ease of use of Nakivo.

The initial setup is totally straightforward with little to no specific competence required, at least, not on the networking side.

Our in-house team managed the implementation.

The software did completely repay itself, especially when we had to activate the disaster recovery plan.

The price is really competitive. The offering, as well as the ability to use it with free ESXi, is awesome.

The setup is as easy as deploying a VM.  

We valued other options, both for individual and granular files backups, such as BackupPC, and also for host systems, such as Veeam.

We chose Nakivo due to its higher feature offering at a lower price point compared to other alternatives.

We're pretty satisfied with the product. I'm also evaluating it for personal non-work-related use.