Hornetsecurity VM Backup (formerly Altaro) is a backup and replication solution for Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. VM Backup can manage large infrastructures, with the revamped backup repository providing long-term storage and more efficient use of disk space.
$59.80
per VM/per year
Keepit
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
The Keepit platform, from the company of the same name in Copenhagen, is a solution that protects cloud data, boasting simple deployment and restore options that enable users to recover historic data. The Keepit platform supports any Cloud Workload and offers full retention on the user's terms from one year to eternity. It features indexing and search to ensure users have a complete view of data. The solution features supports Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics 365, Google Workspace, and…
Powerful and very cost-effective. Simple to use, support was always there and seems to have better features in the roadmap compared to the alternatives out there.
Do you have VMWare? Yes I can back it up. Do you have Hyper-V? Yes I can back it up. That in itself should speak for itself. Altaro has really given a great deal into their software, not only making it easy to use, BUT also a really good and reliable product where you can support your workloads hassle-free, and super lightweight
No need for level 3 backup engineers, with common sense the platform is useable for level 1-3. Keepit takes care of the hassle, no sizing of storage, complicated connectors, or whatever. Point and back up and let it do its job.
Fast and simple setup. I didn't need to read through ANY documentation to set up and have a backup running.
Easy and cost-effective licensing. I didn't need to count CPU's or VM's or other random facts to work out my licensing. Just how many hosts, and then one of 3 feature levels of which two have unlimited VM licensing. Hosts x Feature Set = Cost.
Easy Restores. Backing up is one thing, but restoring and having confidence in the restore is another. It just works, simple and effective.
Help is easy to find if you need it. From within the app, it gives you options of email, phone, and live chat, which is usually available even with odd time zones in play.
More cloud-based storage options. Currently, only Azure is supported, which is excellent, but it would be good to have AWS and Google storage options too.
It would be AWESOME if they could do a restore from Azure cloud direct to an Azure VM instance. Currently, you need to set up an Azure VM machine with nested Hyper-V, install Altaro on that, and then restore into a nested VM, this gets crazy expensive.
Better notification of errors, or more around having a threshold, so if it misses one backup of a constant backup that happens every 5 minutes but recovers at the 10 minutes back, it is ok. Just think it needs to identify significant or long-running issues better than the occasional little issues.
Providing more information on an ongoing restore job. Once you begin a restore or a data import, it seems to be impossible to see which user account that job is tied to.
Its job percentages seem to be drastically inaccurate. It will say a job is 76% complete even though it has only restored 484MB of 8GB - but this is just a little annoying and not a real problem.
A lot of people in the technical industry deliver what I would call snack crackle pop topics, where the software gets over complicated, and they drown people in all the "fancy" features. Altaro, from my point of view" has designed the software to be super usable, easy to implement, as well as support. It is really one of the best designs
Pretty easy to use and setup the backup. For restore there are some limitations and maybe sometimes its not clear how the result will look like in case of folder structure in exchange, especially when merging mailboxes.
One of the most important benefits of the Altaro HyperV backup solution is the support. From the free edition, you're able to chat with the support that can assist you in a remote session an find a quick solution that solves the issue. It is always available. The email support is also.
Support helped us to set up SSO and MFA with our Azure AD Accounts. Once when the backup was failing, they could help us to investigate the reason and find a stale account that was preventing the backup. They are really concerned that the backup works and not only want to close the ticket like other support hotlines.
The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for no apparent reason. In the handful of times I have needed support, they were helpful and straight-forward.
Veeam is our current backup supplier for on-prem infrastructure, whilst we are aiming to reduce and move fully cloud in the next 12 months, we anticipate a bigger investment in keepit as this is more favorable for us.
Restoring our primary ERP VM has already saved many hours of rebuilding from data backups, so that in itself already gave us an excellent ROI for having Altaro running.
The quick and easy setup also makes sense for a fast ROI as we didn't need to spend much time or effort in its set up.
Lastly, any other restores we have done for retrieving files or testing backups were so simple and easy to do that the process didn't take long and saved us time and cost.
