Likelihood to Recommend 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 We have a traditional stack and pretty typical needs as a manufacturer. I have used and evaluated everything out there, but the Unitrends solution fits very well and was competitively priced. I would think if it fits us, it could fit anyone like us with a similar stack.
Read full review Pros 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 It has fully automated and customizable dashboards that can run with less administrative attention. It should be able to run on virtual machines or be deployed as a virtual machine within MS Azure or AWS. It's AI-based ransomware detection helps to understand data characteristics and alerts for ransomware attacks. Read full review Cons 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 Errors on backup jobs could be more clearly explained. As the administrator of the device for my company, I often don't know what caused an error, and can't tell from the error information what happened or caused the error. Updates of the devices should have an automatic option. It takes to much time to do an update to the devices if updates haven't been maintained. Shutdown and restarting the device should be available from the main UI screen to eliminate some time when doing updates or if you're doing some maintenance on the device. 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 We have grown very attached to the Unitrends appliances and their use for recovery and other file restoration needs as well as data archival, data replication to other appliance and data migration to other servers or long term storage requirements. The appliances work well and the support for them is very good as well.
Read full review Usability 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 I have never used such an easy product that is stable and scalable like Unitrends. I have been running backups for MANY years. On premise, tape, disk, cloud, you name it. Unitrends is very flexible, stable and has incredible reporting features. It's nice when management requests a report and it takes you 5 minutes to run it and dump it to PDF. How can you beat that?
Read full review Reliability and Availability The appliances have been there when we need them and have rarely if ever gone down. Hardware issues have been resolved quickly.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Performance The hardware is adequate and speedy. The user interface responds quickly. Backups complete quickly.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
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 They're incredible, attentive, thorough. They make sure my issue is resolved and follow up. I'm usually behind on giving them a reply or an update. They have always gone above and beyond for me, and I'll continue to do the same for them.
Read full review Online Training It was sufficient to get started. It was not super deep. We called support often to get going.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
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 The Unitrends employees involved in the installation were very friendly and knowledgeable. A certain degree of hiccups can be expected during any installation but never shook my confidence because of the friendly and knowledgeable team that was assigned to my project.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 Symantec Backup Exec was the primary tool used for backups for years. We also used Veeam for some Office 365/Exchange backups. Unitrends once configured and set up works very well against the competition. Backup Exec interface was more user friendly. The search tool for exploring backups was much better than Unitrends as well. Unitrends is much faster if you need to restore an entire VM or large file folders. Also once you have Unitrends all set up, it is very low maintenance, it just works. If something fails 9/10 it will correct itself on the next backup that is scheduled to run
Read full review Scalability Once you exceed the capacity of the appliances, you have to forklift a new appliance. This is very expensive.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Return on Investment 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 It has saved some deleted file server data for our business department. We have lost some reports for the business department due to an overlooked setting that make the backup reports look great, but the server was not being backed up in reality. Less anxiety for the IT department, we have backup plan and that is worth a lot to us. Read full review ScreenShots