BDRShield vs. Hornetsecurity VM Backup

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

Altaro VM Backup is great if you have 1 or 2 VMs that aren't backed up by any other means. I initially had some issues with setting it up so it backed up to a NAS, and sometimes the host wouldn't sync to the client. There probably wouldn't be an issue if the host system is the backup location. The interface and configuration were pretty intuitive and gave you a lot of information on the status of your backups.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Fast and simple setup. I didn't need to read through ANY documentation to set up and have a backup running.
• Easy and cost-effective licensing. I didn't need to count CPU's or VM's or other random facts to work out my licensing. Just how many hosts, and then one of 3 feature levels of which two have unlimited VM licensing. Hosts x Feature Set = Cost.
• Easy Restores. Backing up is one thing, but restoring and having confidence in the restore is another. It just works, simple and effective.
• Help is easy to find if you need it. From within the app, it gives you options of email, phone, and live chat, which is usually available even with odd time zones in play.

Incentivized

• 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

• More cloud-based storage options. Currently, only Azure is supported, which is excellent, but it would be good to have AWS and Google storage options too.
• It would be AWESOME if they could do a restore from Azure cloud direct to an Azure VM instance. Currently, you need to set up an Azure VM machine with nested Hyper-V, install Altaro on that, and then restore into a nested VM, this gets crazy expensive.
• Better notification of errors, or more around having a threshold, so if it misses one backup of a constant backup that happens every 5 minutes but recovers at the 10 minutes back, it is ok. Just think it needs to identify significant or long-running issues better than the occasional little issues.

Incentivized

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

It simply works and it is making our lives easier. The renewal process is also really good

Incentivized

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

A lot of people in the technical industry deliver what I would call snack crackle pop topics, where the software gets over complicated, and they drown people in all the "fancy" features. Altaro, from my point of view" has designed the software to be super usable, easy to implement, as well as support. It is really one of the best designs

Incentivized

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

One of the most important benefits of the Altaro HyperV backup solution is the support. From the free edition, you're able to chat with the support that can assist you in a remote session an find a quick solution that solves the issue. It is always available. The email support is also.

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

Altaro has really designed their product so well that you can honestly implement this within a couple of minutes

Incentivized

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

The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for no apparent reason. In the handful of times I have needed support, they were helpful and straight-forward.

• 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.

• Restoring our primary ERP VM has already saved many hours of rebuilding from data backups, so that in itself already gave us an excellent ROI for having Altaro running.
• The quick and easy setup also makes sense for a fast ROI as we didn't need to spend much time or effort in its set up.
• Lastly, any other restores we have done for retrieving files or testing backups were so simple and easy to do that the process didn't take long and saved us time and cost.

Incentivized