Acronis Advanced Backup (or formerly Acronis Backup Cloud) is a Backup-as-a-Service solution for Service Providers, available to add to Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud.
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Quest Rapid Recovery
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Quest Rapid Recovery is a data backup and restore offering from Dell. It provides virtual standby, encryption, replication, deduplication, and the ability for users to run without restore.
Acronis Backup Cloud is suited for backing up Windows Servers. Downtime is greatly decreased by using their virtualization options. You will need a Hyper-V enabled computer to virtualize, though, but this can be one of your general-use workstations. A Windows 10 Pro machine with 16 GB of RAM would do it for you. Or, if you have Macs that need to be backed up, you can do that as well. You can grab either full volume images, or files/folders. I can't really think of a scenario that you would not want Acronis Backup Cloud, except pre-Server 2012 OS's, since virtualization isn't supported on those older systems.
AppAssure works well for quick access to point in time backups of Windows machines without having to do a complete restore. The virtual standby function is useful as a disaster recovery or high availability solution. Recent upgrades to the product and rebranding to Rapid Recovery look promising. If your Linux machines are mission [critical] make sure your administrators test restores so they can perform them in a timely manner should the need arise.
Continuous backup with deduplication and compression
The P to V function of the software is create. To be able to back up physical machines and create a hot spare on a virtual environment was a great selling point.
Can back up physical and virtual (ESX or Hyper-V).
Support for newer operating systems (Windows, Linux, VMware) is slow to be added. Usually takes 3-6 months from the new version being released for it to be supported.
There is no way to automate the testing of the virtual standby which a lot of comparable products are able to do.
The software has a backup type called "base image" which is essentially taking a full backup after an unexpected shutdown of the server. If your servers crash and they are very large, this may impact your storage requirements significantly. They do now have synthetic full backups which alleviate this issue a bit but they are not perfect either.
The cost savings we realized from moving to this software has us hooked - it does everything we need it to do on a very high level (virtualization, for example) and is very low cost for us.
We seldom make use of Acronis support, but when we have they have been brilliant. All our engineers are Acronis certified, if they not able to resolve an issue, we touch base with our local Acronis supplier, Synapsys, who resolve issues 90% of the time.
In the very few instances we've needed support they have been quick, friendly, knowledgeable, and dedicated to servicing our needs. That has only improved since AppAssure was bought out by Quest.
Our initial installation really was not optimum. With the help from Dell Profession Services we were able to get our implementation sized correctly and better understand how to get better deduplication results
We went with Acronis Backup Cloud because we're able to backup all platforms, not just PCs. And the price was good when it comes to all those options. It's a hard sell to clients, but when explained properly, the understand the cost of a good solution. It's like having good car insurance.
I've been using Rapid Recovery for the last 6 years and before that we had used Backup Exec, but it was a different implementation as we were still running backups to LTO3 tapes using the full/incremental backup schemes. So Rapid Recovery (AppAssure at the time) was a big change for us, backing up to disk instead with base images and changes. I would assume Backup Exec can do this as well, but haven't used it since switching. NovaBACKUP was a lower cost solution that seemed geared towards smaller and simpler configurations
AppAssure paid for itself in the first year of usage. A user deleted a major file in our SharePoint sub-site, we used the DocRetriever for SharePoint Console and were able to go back to a particular incremental date and retrieved that file.
One of our file shares crashed and we were able to put the physical server on a virtual standby which saved us hours of imaging and restoring of data. This allowed employees to efficiently continue their daily work without much downtime.
The offsite replication alone has put an ease on the company in case of any disaster. When Hurricane Sandy hit, we didn't have a solution in place which put us on pins and needles to say the least. But with AppAssure we will be able to have some comfort that all of our mission critical data is being offloaded onto our other sites.
