Unitrends Backup Appliance Review
October 05, 2016

Unitrends Backup Appliance Review

Carl Jaspersohn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance

We use two Unitrends 823s backup appliances to protect all of our physical and virtual servers. They provide us with reliable backups, and an easy to use interface for recovery. While I am the primary user of this backup solution, it's not difficult to walk another IT worker through performing a restore in a pinch, or documenting procedures for recovery.

Pros

  • Unitrends makes VM Backup and restore an easy process (both full recovery and file-level).
  • In-line dedupe and incremental forever backups have allowed us to implement hourly backups of our file servers without taking up a significant amount of additional backup storage.
  • We've been able to use the bare-metal restore process to P2V some of our physical servers, and restore others into a dev/testing environment with ease.
  • We use tape for our offsite backup copies and long-term archiving. We've never had a problem restoring from tape with Unitrends.

Cons

  • It would be nice to have the option to restore permissions when doing a file-level restore to a different location/server from where it was originally backed up.
  • I've never been able to get the agent push to work right, so new agent installs and updates require me to log into those servers that require it and kick off the installer.
  • Since moving to Unitrends, our backups have been more reliable than they ever were with Backup Exec.
  • Unitrends has given us the ability to do hourly backups of our file servers. Users that request file restores have really appreciated the granularity of recovery that I'm able to provide them.
  • Unitrends allowed us to consolidate our backup solutions (previously we were using one application for physical and one for virtual backups), which makes the management of backups and restores much more streamlined.
While looking for a new backup solution, we also evaluated the Barracuda Backup appliance. While this solution met many of our needs, one of our requirements was the ability to archive to tape, which Barracuda didn't provide.
Unitrends is well-suited for heavily virtualized environments. Backup jobs can be set up to automatically add new VMs. Restores (both file-level and full recovery) are easy to accomplish. If agent push isn't working (as in my case), backing up a large physical environment could be challenging to set up and maintain as updates are released. The actual backup and restore of physical servers are done well, but managing agents could be a time sink if you have a lot to take care of.

Unitrends Feature Ratings

Data Center Backup
10.0
Universal recovery
10
Instant recovery
Not Rated
Recovery verification
Not Rated
Business application protection
Not Rated
Multiple backup destinations
10
Incremental backup identification
10
Backup to the cloud
Not Rated
Deduplication and file compression
10
Snapshots
10

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