Axcient x360Recover Formerly BRC vs Dropbox

• Support is amazing, fast, never had a single issue working with support when needed. (Doesn't happen very often either that I have to contact support)
• Sales has been amazing as well. Anything I've ever needed I fire off an email and have a response very quickly and am taken care.
• Deploying inside a VMware environment using Windows based serves was painless and quick
• Support for direct mapped ISCSI via MPIO within Windows is crucial when backing up performance dependent servers and this does it all
• Ability to send backups to their cloud is key for DR operations. Support teams will assist with configurations, testing, setup and should a DR occur will be on the phone with you from start to finish.

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• We are transferring large files and multiple files with various internal and external parties due to the ease of sharing files and folders.
• Smart sync, so you don't have to worry about device space and search large file batches quickly.
• Synchronizing a data file across organizations without the user having to do anything other than work is a significant benefit of cloud computing.
• Allowing only the people who need it to have access is a huge perk and works well with other enterprise software.

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• We have a 100% failure rate for full-system restores. After our 3rd complete failure, Axcient flew an engineer to our location, they brought along their own BDR with a copy of our off-site data and spent two full days attempting to restore both from the BDR they brought and the BDR in the customer environment - they went home a complete failure.
• Axcient support is singularly focused on supporting their appliance, regardless of consequences to the rest of your environment. They have no problem recommending such things as deleting all shadow copies on a protected system when their software fails to clean up the one that it has created. When investigating issues I have reported to them they have repeatedly kicked off full backups of systems in the middle of the day and let them run until users complain about system performance. They continue to do this despite my increasingly bitter complaints.
• Linux "support" is a significant overstatement. Linux systems can only be backed up through Samba. You cannot do a "full system restore" of a Linux machine, nor can you run it as a virtual machine on the appliance. Being backed up through Samba means file attributes (ex: immutable, append-only, etc.) are lost and only "regular" files can be backed up (forget about device files, fifos, sockets,etc - all of those would need to be recreated manually in a disaster recovery situation). Axcient has no capacity to run pre/post backup commands on the target system, so you cannot directly trigger `flush` or mysqldump or anything else useful in making sure you're getting anything other than a crash-consistent backup of some selected files. Don't fail to realize that this backup method means you'll have to log into your Linux machine through Samba as a user with read permission on all files you intend to back up; Axcient recommends you use "root" (a cardinal sin).
• Backup times are mysterious and impossible to predict. Examples from a single customer environment: A server with 620GB of data (and a high change rate) takes ~6 hours to back up and a server with roughly 90GB of data (and a particularly LOW change rate) takes 9.5 hours. The times for these machines are consistent. These are both virtual machines running on top of ESXi 5.1 with with more than enough RAM,CPU and IOPS dedicated to them. Axcient support simply states that this is normal behavior and we are not to be concerned.
• Everything is slow. 9.5 hours to back up 90GB of data. Offsite transfers consume an inordinate amount of bandwidth compared to competing products we have deployed. My suspicion is that this is at least partially because entire files are being copied instead of changed blocks.
• "Image level" backups aren't actually image level at all. All backups are done at a file level, the "image" backup job type just means it will automatically select all volumes on the target system and get a system state backup as well.
• "Agentless" backup system... has an agent. Scripts and a delightful executable by the name of "axexesvc.exe"are pushed to and executed on each protected windows system for every backup. This "agentless agent" can have all of the same problems that any other agent can have (such as hanging, running forever, consuming all available system resources, etc.), but also brings with it a fairly unique added gaping security flaw. axexesvc.exe is effectively a trojan horse from Axcient, allowing Axcient's employees to remotely execute any arbitrary command or code on any system in your network using the privileges of whatever account you run your backups as (commonly and per Axcient recommendations: a domain admin level user). There are no restrictions on what they can do or when they can do it and there is no logging of their activity. We have had multiple occasions where Axcient's support staff have abused this "back door" to the detriment of our customers production servers.

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• At one point 2 gigs [were] deemed enough for the "Free" version of Dropbox and its competition. However as even the most simple picture from a phone gets larger, 2 gigs might no longer be enough. Might want to increase the free size to adjust for file size inflation.
• Dropbox's app is very presumptive of updating itself every time you log on to a system that it's installed on. I know that's a feature you can turn off, but the assumption to turn that feature on by default is annoying.
• Dropbox could use a phone app function that would initiate a download to a designated computer hard drive. It would eliminate having to see the file on your phone, go to your computer, turn it on and then download the file.

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• Better customer service when a user deletes a file and needs it restored
• The return on investment will be seen if a crash/down computer were to come about
• IT efficiency is the goal, to be covered in the event of a server failure

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• Dropbox has a very generous free option. Once surpassed, the cost is relatively inexpensive, which makes it a low cost option for file sharing.
• It allows us to easily share files with clients without needing to pay for other services that are email based.
• It's wide usage and wide acceptance in the business world makes it easy to work with other individuals and companies, speeding up collaboration.

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