afi.ai vs. BDRShield

Great for archiving of deleted SharePoint online sites and off-boarded Microsoft 365 users; unlimited number of on-demand backup runs that can be triggered in the application by system administrators.

First of all Web UI makes it so much easier to manage, with few clicks you can schedule a backup, you can see the progress and you can instantly recover it. There is a multiple environment support which is great for hybrid environments. Pricing is more reasonable than other high priced backup solutions

Incentivized

• Archiving of deleted Microsoft 365 users.
• Backup of SharePoint lists and OneNote books.
• Fast offline export of a mailbox and SharePoint items.

• Bare metal system images. These are incredibly flexible, enabling you to do dissimilar hardware restores, local or online backups and restore to VHD
• Full, differential and transaction log backups for SQL server, ensuring rapid backup and restore, with maximum storage efficiency.
• Incremental backups for files, meaning only the changes which have been made to a file are backed up, dramatically reducing time to backup and increasing storage efficiency.

• It would be handy to have SharePoint file versions comparisons in the UI
• Email alerts on settings changes would be good to have too.

• User interface on the servers do not have enough tools to better monitor the systems and finding information is difficult.
• User interface at portal is difficult to navigate and confusing
• Support documentation is too generic and rarely answers my questions.
• Licensing and acquisition. As a reseller and partner the licensing model is confusing and the portal interface to manage licensing should be scrapped and rebuilt. It is difficult to navigate and the available information is too vague.
• Recently, communication with new channel contact. My previous contact was articulate and answered my questions.
• Did I mention licensing? This is the most confusing and difficult process I've dealt with in 25 years. Makes Microsoft look simple.

Incentivized

We will continue to renew the service for as long as we continue to use MS 365, unless Microsoft will release native Office 365 backup that provides all necessary features, including multi-geo admin roles, long-term affordable archiving storage tier, auto-conversion of email formats (MBOX, EML etc), point-in-time preview of previous file versions.

I think the product will remain useful for us and as the company keeps improving features it will continue to be relevant and useful. We don't like switching technology much and BDR solutions shouldn't be something that a company replaces every few years., that's why most likely we will keep using it.

Incentivized

The UI is very intuitive and requires almost zero training to use. Our end users were able to use it with after just reading a simple one-pager.

As outlined in are parts of this review, I have various issues with the way their KB center is structured and how error codes aren't documented or KBs for a specific error provide steps for older versions of the software and aren't applicable to the current version because of a design layout change. "Go here and select Y" where the "here" has been removed and doesn't exist anymore. Or they release a new version without any supporting documentation even though they restructured a lot of the interface and updated the error messages.

Incentivized

We needed to contact them three times over the course of two years, and it was very good. Very fast response, and the people are super technical and to the point.

It often takes a very long time to get an issue fixed. the support folks seem committed to getting it fixed but they often seem to be trying different things and hoping something works. I did not get the sense that they had a clear idea what was wrong.

Incentivized

Overall the implementation was not complicated. The linux version installation is rather easy step by step process. It's just when you do something for the first time, it always take a bit longer because it's new and you just need to be more focused to configure everything properly

Incentivized

afi is next generation system, with our previous vendor we had to wait for a long time to access data, sometimes up to 24h.The reason for that was our scale according to the support team. ( 50TB +) With afi it takes a few seconds. The UI is super simple and easy to use, no training required for end-users to work with the system. afi support is super responsive and very helpful.

I tested Vembu against Veeam and for the price, Vembu was the better option. I also had a great support experience as I had to contact Vembu twice after mistakes I made. While using Veeam the software was not as intuitive and support responses were not as swift and accurate.

Incentivized

• It's hard to assess ROI here, however we were able to recover very important documents and full user accounts for executive team during the audit. It helped in a big way.
• Self-Service is a life saver for IT helpdesk team, saved a lot of human hours.

• Backups complete quickly each night saving me time from always having to modify client backups to fit within their backup windows.
• Money: We are saving hundreds of dollars per year for us and our clients by switching to this product.
• I no longer spend significant time managing backups, checking their status, etc. Alerts are consistent and warn me if there's a problem. It just works. I rarely have to touch it other than when I do random restore tests (as I do with any backup product) and the instant recovery feature works well for that.