Carbonite Server vs. CTERA Edge X Series (Cloud Storage Gateways)

More than enough for small companies with several on-prem servers. In 2021, it wouldn't be wise to pit all important data to a single backup service. Carbonite Server is solid, but it's not 100% reliable so I'd definitely recommend having multiple backup services either on the cloud in conjunction with other backup services so the user has multiple safety nets in case of disaster and failed granular restorations.

Incentivized

This is all about the selling you a "Device" and prices vary greatly between resellers. The devices work well, but the pure cloud solutions need a lot of work.

• The end-user experience is as simple and robust as I have ever seen from a backup solution. The end-user dashboard, should you choose to allow them access, is intuitive and granular.
• eVault has the best bandwidth management I have experienced. The endpoint target is available for all operating systems and is intelligent and efficient using very low overhead. It includes data de-dupe and encryption while using very little system resources. Combine these features with bandwidth throttling and you can backup a large amount of data over any size wire.
• eVault's deployment options will fit any budget and size environment. You can deploy using your own hardware, even. They really focus on providing the right solution for each customer instead of making each customer fit into their pre-determined box.

Incentivized

• Standard File Backup

• The backup report really needs improvement. It is really pathetic, as it gives wrong information. It is not suitable for auditing.
• The Exchange DAG backup should support instead of configuring each exchange server.
• Cloud infrastructure supports a lot of AWS and Azure instances that are coming up.

Incentivized

• SQL Backups just don't work reliably. For us, we lost all of our SQL data backed up through the CTERA Application process. Although the logs indicated a success, that was really not the case. This came close to putting us out of business. Luckily I had taken a genuine SQL backup to a folder. Unfortunately it was a month old. We had to pick-up the pieces from there.
• Don't use it for file sync and share. There are better products out there i.e. anchorworks.com
• Support sucks. Good luck with response time and answers that are inconsistent between team members. For example I had to rebuild a VM from scratch. When I re-installed the CTERA client It obviously thought I was adding another device. When I inquired to tech support, one member said "copy the old Data folder" (I still had the old VHD. That did not work). The other directed me to the correct spot to just change the associated folder. The turn-around time was over 24 hours for this simple fix.
• Documentation, plenty of fodder but no real tech there.

We packaged carbonite server with the end user product that they provide but we have had issues where the end user site has been down for days at time and backups for both server and user are backing up but we do not the get notification that it was completed for several days. There appears to be latency issues with the mail delivery for completed backups. Additionally, I have used other backup products and find the Carbonite website interface very clunkly and difficult to navigate.

Incentivized

Product needs a lot of improvements in some features like Cloud and Reporting.

Incentivized

Some of the requests we could not get resolved on time. They took a long time to provide the reason for the issue we had raised.

Incentivized

We had appliance and we just needed to setup the Director Console which was straight forward and easy.

Incentivized

Netbak is a great product but we also had a secondary issue of having to backup several PC's on site and at remote locations. Carbonite helped with both and gave us one central admin console to be able to check the progress of all our backups, where netbak would have required us to setup a tunnel or use the internet to move data back to our main office.

Incentivized

Unfortunately CTERA does not stack up well if you want a pure cloud BDR. I have use iDrive and Asigra. iDrive has similar support and SQL backup issues. Asigra can vary widely in support and price, but the software is solid.

• While EVault can become expensive if you have a lot of data to store, but you have to keep in mind that it does not cost you anything more to restore your data in the event of an emergency. Some systems give you a great upfront cost, until you actually need to retrieve your data.

Incentivized

• NONE, it about put us out of business