UNITRENDS Backup - Set it and Forget It!
June 09, 2016
UNITRENDS Backup - Set it and Forget It!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
We originally had traditional tape backups that were inconsistently kept and month ends were sent offsite to another office. No one likes the backup process, but we need to do it, so I tried to find a more automated way to do it so I would not have to continuously change tapes and snail mail tapes offsite. I wanted to find the best product with the least amount of downtime for me to manage and Unitrends came out on top. We use it currently for daily-weekly backups, replicated to a duplicate unit sitting in our offsite hot location and use the archiving recovery unit attached to the replicated unit to maintain a 1 year retention for all of our main data. Finding the sweet spot with regards to timing/retention/appliance size was a little rocky in the beginning, but their support staff was very helpful.
I check the jobs every other day, but usually if I see green across the board I know the system is doing its job. Every 3-4 months I go to the hotsite to swap disks for the yearly retention when they fill up (the archive automatically pulls month end data for annual retention).
I check the jobs every other day, but usually if I see green across the board I know the system is doing its job. Every 3-4 months I go to the hotsite to swap disks for the yearly retention when they fill up (the archive automatically pulls month end data for annual retention).
- Automated backups are truly automated. Very rarely does a job fail without something substantially being wrong.
- The alerts I have set up are on-point everyday.
- Easy to read graphical interface with informative reporting.
- In the beginning their support was as quick as going to their support website and chatting with someone to assist. This became under the performance I was used to when we originally purchased the product. When I made our account manager aware of the situation he was all over it and explained it was temporary. Since then I have not had much issue.
- The sizing on the appliance versus data growth over time is a hard thing to gauge for just about any all in one backup system, but it would be nice to have a clearer, crisper process for understanding of the space you will eventually end up with. The system has landing space for processing data, space for bare metal recovery and actual storage space after the de-duplication and compression process that happens in the landing area. The trick is finding out how your data plays in the space you acquired for all this to happen. It will effect your retention capability.
- We spend less time worrying whether a back up was taken or not, where to find it, and how recent. We also spend less time with offsite storage for business continuity because this is automated as well.
It has been a while but I remember a reseller trying to sell me on grid system backups. The system was not quick user friendly and seemed a waste of money for the model.