Hornetsecurity VM Backup (formerly Altaro) is a backup and replication solution for Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. VM Backup can manage large infrastructures, with the revamped backup repository providing long-term storage and more efficient use of disk space.
Each of the products got its own strengths. For me, it is all about the customer, and about their requirements. Altaro is very good software, and I can get protected what I need to for our customers, and that is the most important part.
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 …
When we have looked for a VM backup solution we've tried some other competitors, even to backup just data and not all VM. We've tested Acronis backup that is a complete solution but more expensive and more complicated, we've also tried Nakivo but didn't convince us the …
We backup all VMs with both Altaro and Arcserve. Altaro is very powerful when it's time to back up and restore, but gets corrupted too often. Arcserve assures that we always have a safe copy of the VMs, but the backup and restore process is very slow. Can take days to restore a …
Veeam seems like another excellent backup solution, and appears to have many similar features to Altaro VM Backup but also seemed more complicated to set up when I tried 5+ years ago.
Also, at the time, Veeam's licensing was very confusing where you needed to count CPU's on the …
Altaro brings value to organizations looking at other platforms. It's definitely less expensive overall than Veeam, Datto or Infrascale. The recovery solution for Altaro is very good and reliable. Any organization looking at Veeam should consider Altaro as a potential …
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.