2020-06-04T09:41:22Z

What advice do you have for others considering SolarWinds Backup?

Julia Miller - PeerSpot reviewer
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6 Answers

MP
Reseller
2020-11-08T07:00:00Z
Nov 8, 2020

It is a very good system. We have very few problems with it. Just do it. If you get stuck, find the guys in support and they'll talk you through it because it's very quick and easy. They are quite happy to come onto a Remote Desktop Session, and go, "No, you've got that wrong." It's a good product that is sensibly priced. Anyone who has a modicum of IT skills can make it work. I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10.

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DW
Real User
2020-10-04T06:40:00Z
Oct 4, 2020

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.

CS
Reseller
2020-10-04T06:40:00Z
Oct 4, 2020

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.

JC
MSP
2020-10-01T09:58:00Z
Oct 1, 2020

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.

JC
Real User
2020-07-12T11:48:00Z
Jul 12, 2020

The biggest lesson I've learned from using MSP Backup & Recovery is that there are options out there that I can be confident in, and I don't feel like I have to break a customer's bank to offer them. It's a really big deal for us to be able to do that. Having tested it and used it at this level, it's changed so much how we view what can be done, for keeping even our small customers' data safe. Before, it felt like I had to do a lot of extra things for the smaller places, because they couldn't afford the solutions that were better. Now I have something that I can trust to just do that for them. And it's so easy to maintain that it's really hard to look back and see that we were using other stuff before. My advice would be to understand that the features are there. Price it out, compared to the other solutions. Because they give you such clear-cut pricing with the system itself, it's really hard, when you get down to dollar and cents, for anybody else to compete, in my opinion. The only use case where that changes is maybe where many terabytes or petabytes of data are included, and you do not need a cloud solution. In that case your cloud solution is some sort of data center or solution you've set up yourself. If you need to back up to the cloud, and this goes for any size organization, and a data center is not an option, SolarWinds is something you have to consider. At least to price it out, especially considering you're never under any commitment, even if you want to try it for a month on one system. The worst case would be that you would get charged for a month of trying it out. What I did for us, beforehand, was that I tested how it worked on our systems. The R&D for that, for researching that and figuring it out, is $10 on a workstation, or $50 for that one month. How are you going to compare that to anything else, where you have to sign a contract? You might get a trial, but it's unlikely that you are going to be able to figure everything out in that time. It's so much easier to work with, in all aspects that I can think of, specifically as an MSP. It's not that I think this is the solution for everybody, but for MSPs that don't support incredibly large organizations, this is perfect. It is exactly the solution that I wish I had found years ago. When it comes to resource and bandwidth use in terms of backup recovery, for the most part I have not yet run into an issue. The one thing I have seen is a light blip on the VoIP. One time, when I was new to this and I restored a grouping of folders for a customer, while it was pushing stuff down we had some reduced phone quality. That download was taking up some of their VoIP. People could hear them fine but they were getting some static. What I found out is that there's an option to limit bandwidth during the day. For every customer now, when I install the product, I just do a quick audit of their internet speed. Based on what they can get, I give the download and the upload a percentage of that, so that it won't affect other systems. The bandwidth usage is completely customizable. If you want it to, it'll use your whole connection to get something important, and you can change that on the fly. It's not like it takes time for those settings to push down. But if you want good, everyday operations, you just limit it to a healthy percentage of the bandwidth during the day, and you're good to go. I am not using it to sell the automated recovery testing and I do not like that feature. I believe it has more of a risk for a false positive than anything. I have done the testing internally up until now with a team. When we have issues, we work on it as a group. We're all very aware of some of the pain points of restorations. One of those pain points is that, sometimes, that virtual disaster recovery is so good that even if I had a technician that did not configure a backup properly, if an error was made on our end, I don't get to see it because the virtual machine will spin up almost no matter what, Windows 10 and past. This system is that good. Even if I have a messed up computer that got backed up, it will still run and work and I've got to do a little bit more digging to figure out if it has an issue. I had exactly that happen; not in a real-world scenario, but when our team was testing. I could have just said, "Okay, I'm going to do recovery testing and give you a green light when the VM turns on." It can do that. This system is so great that it can turn almost any VM on. This is more of a personal philosophy for how our company runs stuff, as opposed to the viability of the tool itself. SolarWinds does the most that it can really do, without manual interaction from a human being. It does a good image test to see if all your stuff is there and if the VM turned on. But if you do that and it allows you to become complacent, you could miss backing up the drive and never know it. We actually almost had that happen and it might have if we didn't do our own recovery testing and check for stuff like that. Overall, I would give SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery a good 10 out of 10. There is not another product in the SolarWinds line of products that I'm happier with. This is the best of what they have, and I use almost every product they have, except their antivirus. The highlights of this solution are the way that they price it, how easy it is to use, and how customizable it is. I get to choose exactly how I want to use it, since it comes, default, with every feature. I get to choose how I present it to customers, if I want to do that. This is a good product that's really fair, and it's not complicated.

MB
Consultant
2020-06-04T09:41:22Z
Jun 4, 2020

For us, this product works well. Our use case is fairly simple and it covers exactly what we need. I recommend using it, especially for an on-premises deployment. My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is that it might be perfect as a cloud-based solution, but you may need some time to figure it out. I think that it should be just as easy on the cloud as it is on-premises. As a hybrid model, I think that it makes sense. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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Cove Data Protection, from N-able, is a comprehensive solution designed to safeguard critical business data. It offers a range of features including backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and endpoint protection. With automated backups and flexible scheduling options, it ensures data is protected and easily recoverable.  The solution also includes advanced security measures such as encryption and ransomware detection to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches. Cove Data Protection...
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