Carbonite Endpoint vs. Percona XtraBackup

Carbonite Endpoint 360 is a great solution for any organization with compliance needs. Office 365 defaults to a 30 day backup of all data. Carbonite Endpoint 360 extends this well beyond 30 days and provides an all-inclusive source for retention for data in Office 365. Any small to medium business would greatly benefit from this solution as they can design their entire infrastructure in Office 365 and ensure it's all backed up.

Incentivized

Well suited to databases < 10TB. For larger than this, I would go with snapshots.

• It is excellent at automating your backups. You don't need to manually do it, just set it up once and let it run in the background.
• It's pretty simple to set up and use. It will automatically suggest the best options that work for most people and you can be up and running pretty quickly.
• It's safe and reliable. We have been using it for a couple of years now and had no major issues.
• Their phone support is excellent.
• It's also really easy to maintain your backed up data to reduce redundancy.

Incentivized

• Non-blocking backup : Backup process will not put any lock on the database.
• Fast recovery : As it's a file level backup so it's quite fast in both backup and recovery.
• Consistent backup : Xtrabackup always ensures consistent backup.
• Easy to configure and Use.
• Integration with clouds

• To be honest not so impressed with the amount of time it has taken to get data backed up to the cloud.
• I have not had to do a restore at this time so I cannot comment on the restore process.
• I was not aware at time of procurement that the upload process would take so long since we were not procuring their hardware. Sales rep mad it seem like upload would only take a day or two and we are now starting week 7 hoping to be done by week 8 for 1.5 TBs of data.

Incentivized

• The only feature that could use some improvement is partial backup restores. For example, I have a multi-tenant database at the schema level running on a single Percona Server instance. As a tenant grows too large for the share instance or becomes a noisy neighbour we need to move a the tenants schema to its own instance with minimal downtime, meaning that we would run the new instance as a replica with replication filters until failover. In terms of doing a consistent backup, there may be challenges and it is currently possible with XtraBackup, but it would be great if the process was simplified and ensured to be consistent.

I found their alerting to be very poor. I missed several days of backups without knowledge of this, until I signed into the portal. I would get daily emails reporting backups were in progress or done, but nothing indicating that a backup had been stuck or paused for 3 days. For this reason alone, I did not renew.

Incentivized

Takes a bit of getting used to when you first set it up.

Incentivized

Does what it needs to do quietly and efficiently in the background without interrupting the workflow. It offers instant automated back-ups without troubling the end user. As it is such an automated system, once it is up and running, there is little or no support needed from the service provider. From what I understand the support from Carbonite during the setup and implementation was absolutely fine.

Incentivized

If you pay for support it is great, otherwise you have to google.

Incentivized

We have also used Mozy Pro and Dropbox. They are all pretty similar in functionality/features of backing up data (not system state or databases as I don't think any of the 3 are well suited for that). To me, it comes down to personal preference and choosing a product that is universal for multiple users, for ease of management.

Incentivized

We have evaluated Mysqldump and MySQL Enterprise backup. Mysqldump is not a scalable solution. MEB is a paid and closed source. As we are truly open-source, we were looking for an open-source solution that was reliable and scalable. Xtrbackup has all the required features to fulfill our requirements.

• Carbonite Endpoint has demonstrated value in its ability to easily restore seemingly lost files for remote users.
• While we haven't yet had to exercise it, knowing we have the option of remotely wiping endpoints containing sensitive data has brought confidence to our management team that we can mitigate data breaches through preventable means.
• The privacy issue around device tracking is costing the company in terms of employee trust and morale and needs to be mitigated with appropriate messaging and/or disabling of this feature.

Incentivized

• Secure, reliable, fast and consistent backups. Open source with zero cost.
• We satisfy our regulatory requirements.