Simple/Convenient Cloud Backup Solution
Updated August 02, 2019
Simple/Convenient Cloud Backup Solution
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Solarwinds Backup
We provide Solarwinds Backup as a service to our customers, most of them in the hospitality market. Having a requirement for PCI compliance, we use Solarwinds as a second solution for cloud backups, and we use a different solution for local backups, as a way to offer redundancy to our customers. Because it is a versatile tool that could perform image backups, files and folders backups or specific database backups, it is suitable to implement in many different companies.
- The management portal and client interfaces are web-based, which makes it convenient to set up and monitor the backups and modify configurations.
- The solution can perform different type of backups, that could suit all customers depending on their needs: Image backups (system state) which allows customers to have an option for business continuity, Files and Folders, to select the specific data to go to the cloud, or application-specific backups for SQL, MySql, Oracle, VMWare, SharePoint, Exchange, HyperV.
- It does have great deduplication capabilities, which does a good job compressing the data and transferring offsite.
- The management of the device properties provides useful information like the history of the backups, audit of actions performed in the client, errors and statistics.
- The files and folders restore in each client is simple and user friendly.
- To perform restores on a different location, there's a need to install a standalone application call the Recovery Console, which makes it too much trouble. Instead, this should have been performed over the same backup management portal, where you should have been able to select in which location you want to restore.
- The business continuity features, available for the system state backups, like restoring a backup as a virtual machine or performing a bare-metal restore, also require to install different standalone applications for each. And in disaster scenarios, both tasks take too much time to get everything running.
- The retention of the backups (the archiving feature) needs to be set up individually for each server at a time, when this is something that should be more easily managed by the service provider (not expecting to be set up by the customer in each device) as a general setting within the Backups Profiles or Product Management.
- There should be a better reporting tool, that would allow to export backup and restore events, as well as user activities.
- The configurations for Backup Profiles and Product Management could be redundant and confusing.
- Solarwinds Backup gives us the ability to build and expand our storage nodes, which makes it a good option for service providers to manage their customers and the storage of the data, and manage their billing model as needed.
Technically, Datto is a better option for business continuity and local backups. However, we considered using Solarwinds Backup for redundancy because it's a simple cloud backup solution that has good deduplication. Personally, I believe that the Datto offsite transfer process is less efficient and this difference in the performance makes Solarwinds Backup a better choice when looking just for basic cloud backup capabilities.