Like sands through the hourglass so are the days of systems administrator.
September 09, 2016
Like sands through the hourglass so are the days of systems administrator.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
We currently use the Unitrends Backup Appliance for all system backups both physical and virtual. We have over 40 virtual machines in addition to 8 physical machines. We moved from a Backup Exec environment to our current physical appliance. We found the tapes and speed to be too much of a burden to keep up with our needs for speed and space. We were constantly loading and reloading tapes. Recovery of a particular file or folder took over half an hour to find the tape, load the tape and then catalog and restore the file. It was a very dated way of doing recovery. Now with our Unitrends appliance, I can restore files in less than 60 seconds in some cases. The ease of the restore is very easy and fast.
- The ability to store several terra bytes of data on one appliance is great. There is no need to shuffle tapes in and out. The appliance holds all the backups and retains them as you see fit.
- The ability to do multiple backups is a great advantage. Our previous backup to tape would only allow us to backup to one tape drive at a time. This took way too long.
- They need better testing of their appliance updates. I recently lost several backups due to an update to the appliance. I was not happy to find weeks of backups gone due to their mistake.
- The ability to run several reports is nice, however, the interface is very hard to use. It is not very intuitive.
- It would be nice to know when a particular backup has been deleted from the appliance. I have yet to find a good report that will inform me of what backups are gone and for what reason. I would love a report that says we dropped or deleted backup "X" because backup "Y" needed more room.
- Our Unitrends Appliance has saved me more than once from "user error." The ability to recover a file within minutes is invaluable.
- The incremental backups have allowed us to restore quickly after ransomeware was introduced into our system.
- The ability to do multiple backups at a time has allowed us to implement more backups during off peak hours. With our old tape library system we were only able to do two backups at a time which severly hampered our timeline. Now I can get more info faster which is great.
We tried the Barracuda Backup appliance which showed promise however, it did not allow us to archive to our existing tape library. This was a deal killer for us. The Unitrends appliance still allows us to utilize our tape drive for archiving purposes. This was not an option for us so we went with the Unitrends system. We have not been disappointed yet.