Unitrends gave us backup unity & consistency!
June 20, 2016
Unitrends gave us backup unity & consistency!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
Our Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance is our primary backup solution, currently for our entire Chicago area location, and potentially expanding to our second location near Philadelphia soon. It's used to backup our production, front office, AD servers, as well as all key desktop PCs and laptops used by our employees. It addresses our need for disaster recovery, including the ability to quickly recover key PCs that may crash and burn, or encounter parts failures, etc.
- Set it and forget it configuration... for the most part, it's been very easy to use, allowing me to configure it properly once and just let it do its job.
- The unit provides thorough, but concise reporting on any backup issues, failures, retention policy concerns, etc, so that I can address them as needed in a timely fashion.
- Applying the updates to the device's firmware is very easy to do, completes quickly... I do wish it would alert me right when updates become available .. maybe that's just a setting I need to turn on? That said, it's not been a problem at all thus far.
- In regards to the alerts on retention policy issues... honestly, I'm not quite sure why I even get alerts on that, unless I've configured the retention policies wrong on some systems. If you set it properly, why would any systems ever have too much backups retained, or not enough? Well, the 'not enough' I can see if backups are failing, but oftentimes that's not the case. Backups are succeeding and the system still tells me that there's PCs that have protection below their minimum retention goal... how does that happen?
- The agent updating is problematic at best. The push functionality to update agents remotely doesn't always work, or in my case, it usually doesn't. I end up having to go to each machine and update manually. I worked with support on this in the past, but they didn't really have a solution that would allow me to simply push all the updates via the management interface. They basically told me I'd have to continue updating manually or sending users the link and instructions to let them do it. Not ideal...
- The awesome chat capability to simply open a chat directly through the device's interface was removed. Now you have to go to the support site, click on chat there, and even then you have to type in your problem and let it do a knowledge base search, suggest possible solutions first... instead of just connecting you QUICKLY to a live person like it used to. It's still pretty easy to get a live person, just have to jump through more hoops than you used to. I miss the old way...
- Thankfully we haven't had a lot of critical system failures, but we have been able to recover key deleted or corrupted files on numerous occasions saving substantial time that would have cost us man hours re-processing production data files, not to mention downtime for production itself. We've been able to very quickly restore lost or corrupted files with really pretty minimal lost time. The majority of time lost was not due to waiting for Unitrends' recovery processes... more so it was lost just myself and other IT personnel diagnosing the situation, assessing the damage, making sure we're recovering all the files affected, etc.
- Actually just yesterday, I used it to simply restore files to a new server shared folder for a user's network folder. Somehow the user's permissions were altered such that they simply could no longer connect to the older server where their share had been previously located. I'd been planning to relocate her files to the newer server, due to a network segmentation for security reasons anyway. I had very odd permissions issues even for the domain admin account, that essentially wouldn't allow me even to copy her files over, so I just decided why not grab the files from a Unitrends backup and restore them to the new server... problem solved!
- Acronis Backup & Recovery
As I mentioned in the previous answer, Unitrends brought us new functionality that Acronis simply didn't have for us. We could have certainly upgraded Acronis and obtained many of the same features, but we liked the appliance approach, not having to build a huge server or NAS dedicated just to being a backup destination, along with the much lesser impact of active backups on the endpoints in comparison to what we'd experienced with Acronis. Users routinely requested me to stop their backups if they were happening while they were using their PCs, which though we typically avoided doing it during working hours - in some cases that was unavoidable. Regardless, Unitrends was the superior solution in our eyes at the time of evaluation.
Unitrends Feature Ratings
Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support cares about my success | Slow Initial Response |
Numerous times just jumping into a quick chat, not having to spend tons of time giving them your information because they have it from your device already when you start chatting (at least they used to when you could do it direct from the firmware/GUI - not sure now? Anyways, just had a series of good experiences a couple years ago right after our implementation letting them jump into our device via a support tunnel, analyze the problem and resolve it directly - or provide me the direction to do so when appropriate...