A Complete Backup Service for All
Overall Satisfaction with Datto
We provide Datto as a service to our customers, specifically companies in the Hospitality market. We send our customers the Datto devices, and we implement it and manage the backups to make sure that everything is working properly, and that our customers' data is up to date and secure. We value Datto especially for its business continuity functionalities that allow our customers to be covered and resolve any issues they might have in a timely manner when having a disaster scenario.
- It does full image backups, which is its best feature, since it allows to do virtual machines restores when servers fail, either to run locally on the backup server or on the cloud. Being able to virtualize a server when it fails in just a few minutes and having the freedom and time to decide what to do next, whether you need to get new hardware or talk to a provider to assist in troubleshooting, it makes your life easier.
- The user interface to manage servers and configure settings is very user-friendly.
- It has many different restoration options. From simple file and folder restore over Windows Explorer, the option to perform local or cloud virtualizations, perform an image restore to a physical machine, export images as VMDK or VHD files, virtualize directly to ESX hosts... they have done a good job in providing many different restore capabilities that could suit everybody's needs.
- It can also be used as an effective tool to mitigate the effects of ransomware, since the recovery points taken are not affected and can be used to recover data after an attack.
- The Datto client supports all Windows versions, and there's a client for Linux and Mac as well.
- There's a functionality to backup share folders only, instead of doing the full image of the servers.
- They have ongoing support and specialists for disaster recovery scenarios.
- The cloud transfer is not as efficient as it could be. When backups flagged to the cloud are queued, they don't get released individually, but you have to wait until the whole package gets transferred. This is especially bad if the bandwidth is not good enough, and this also affects the capacity of the devices, because the points flagged cannot be deleted by the retention, and the backup appliance could get full because of this.
- The account security for the user is not good enough. The users and passwords have to be created by another user, and there's no 2FA. As a partner, we do have that functionality, but the direct users don't have it available.
- There's not enough reporting, which would be useful for compliance. There's a need to be able to log the activities that a user does on a device, the restores performed, and updates on settings. This has not been covered yet.
- While there are enough people for support, sometimes the support team won't be as proactive as you would expect. They work within the limits of the functionalities of their tools, but they could get stuck troubleshooting the environments as a whole. Since the Datto client works with Windows features, other applications can affect the status of the client, but the support team has limitation in the way they troubleshoot these scenarios.
- Datto has had a positive impact on our business because of the different type of services it provides. They have a product that works for any company.
- The small Datto devices can be affordable, but the larger ones, 18TB and up, might be too expensive for the type of hardware they sell.
- However, there's also the option of using your own hardware, and Datto provides their software to install. This is a good option to reduce costs while selling local backup appliances and making a good profit from it.
Compared to Solarwinds or EMC Avamar, Datto is more improved, and it's much better at business continuity. Both tools are only cloud-based backup services, but Datto has the option of the local backups as well, which is more efficient for disaster scenarios. Datto has many more options for restores, and is better developed and user-friendly.