Likelihood to Recommend If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup
CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros Cheap storage of backup data. Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Sometime due to slow drives there are operation failure noticed by us in testing Cost of restoring data is high and if you have regular restoring them it is not good option and slow as well. While we were setting up the system we took some support from AWS and in many cases their answers were not up to the mark. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It simply works and it is making our lives easier. The renewal process is also really good
Read full review Usability It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.
Read full review 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating Altaro has really designed their product so well that you can honestly implement this within a couple of minutes
Read full review Alternatives Considered Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class. Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines. Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots