Unitrends Backup Appliance Review
April 03, 2017
Unitrends Backup Appliance Review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
We use two Unitrends Backup Appliances with archivers in two different physical locations. Our primary site is backed up to the one appliance and then replicated to the off-site appliance, both appliances are then archived periodically to removable drives which are kept and stored. It handles the backup and recovery for the entire organization. We have been using it for 3 years and to date have had no major issues. What issues we have had were quickly resolved by customer support.
- Reliable backup and recovery of agent based servers including things like Exchange and SQL databases. Having used another backup appliance it would do this as well but the Unitrends reliability and interface when backing up and restoring is far superior.
- Replication on the Unitrends is probably the best I've seen in a long time. The ability to replicate between 2 devices is quite common but the Unitrends seems to handle it for more efficiently.
- Retention settings on the Unitrends are easy to set up and actually work unlike our previous system, and the ability to archive our backups off to standard 3.5" drives is great and suits our needs perfectly.
- Customer Support is Grade A+. These guys do not stop until you're happy and/or the problem has been fixed. I very seldom see support at this level and it's great to know that if I have a problem all I have to do is call them up.
- One thing I would like to see is the ability to restore individual emails (mounting the database) without the use of a third party software. Honestly I've only ever had to restore anything from an Exchange DB once since getting the Unitrends and there are ways around needing the third party but some sort of interface built into the Unitrends for such a scenario would be great.
- We have used the unitrends backup to recover from 3 or 4 Ransomware attacks over the last 3-4 years. Every time it has allowed us to recover with a minimal amount of data loss. We also use it on a weekly basis to recover documents that have been overwritten or accidentally deleted. Having a reliable backup makes things so much easier as you don't have to worry about whether a file is available or not when it is needed.
Barracuda is what we were using before, it was unreliable, support was iffy at best, and the interface was horrendous. After numerous issues, we asked one of our providers to look into other options and they came back with Unitrends. We have been happy with it since. Unitrends has been reliable, support has been great, and the interface is far easier to use and navigate than Barracuda was.