Generally very happy with our Unitrends Backup Appliance, once configured correctly
August 08, 2016
Generally very happy with our Unitrends Backup Appliance, once configured correctly
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
Unitrends Backups provide business security for our digital print assets and our QuickBooks accounting files. It has been useful when files get deleted accidentally on Windows and Mac servers. It provides us protection against events such as hurricanes as well with the cloud copies of our files.
Pros
- The backup admin interface is pretty straight forward and has several useful pages if you dig around. I never received training on it but have been able to use it.
- Once configured properly, which is not obvious as to how to segment your backups, they run like clockwork.
- Restoring files is pretty easy.
Cons
- The initial installation was for one backup of the root level of a 3.5 TB volume. The sysadmin never realized the backups never completed for several months. I researched the situation on the internet and read how users were more successful segmenting their backups into multiple volume backups. This solved our issue. I have 30 incremental backs and a daily diff and a weekly master on our most valuable digital graphic assets.
- Customer Support took a couple times to get the config working for me but they are very well trained and great to work with.
- I paid $18,000 over three years for a backup appliance with cloud storage. It's a very pricey solution. I will be reconsidering other options if we can't reduce the annual renewal on our existing box.
- As nice as it is to HAVE backups, only the recent backups are available. I value this as a short term backup of our most recent data. Its not used for long term archival and recovery in our shop. It's for restoring lost or accidentally deleted files mainly. At $6,000 a year that's a pretty pricey deal for the less than a dozen files we have had to restore in the three years we have had the appliance.
- I bought this as an insurance policy for server failure or a hurricane level event. We have had neither so have not had to cash in my insurance policy. Losing our server would require lots of work to rebuild it without backups. It think the risk outweighs the cost of now having an active backup system.
I don't recall the details. User happiness found in our web research was a big factor. Users of other products who had very bad experiences also played a part. The automatic cloud backup bundled into the package was a strong selling feature. Don't ask me if I have actually SEEN these cloud backs though.
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 understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - There was a bug but after they updated my software, as we were not with the current version, everything worked fine.
I think there were 3 tech support calls over a period of a month. We would get it set up only to have it start failing in a few weeks. The third guy I talked to spent over 2 hours with me, a very pleasant and productive 2 hours I might add, getting the multiple backups working perfectly. Its been 6 months or more since my last tech support call. Their support is GREAT!
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