Carbonite Server vs. Percona XtraBackup

A key question is, "how much critical data needs to be backed up?". A follow-up question might be, "what impact would it have on your business and reputation if you were to lose this data or take more than a few days to recover?" If a company's data is not critical or valuable to the success of their business, then this is not a good solution.

Incentivized

Xtrabackup has many excellent features that are supposed to be in any backup solution. It's well suited for all MySQL deployments but it's not appropriate for any other database. If you are using any MySQL flavor (MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server for MySQL), it's your only and perfect solution for backup and disaster recovery.

• Their web portal is easy to use to monitor server, check logs, restore or run an ad-hoc backup job.
• Minimal problems, but when there is a problem, customer support is friendly and flexible in finding a solution. Contacting through their customer portal is convenient.
• Competitive pricing for level of service provided.

Incentivized

• The ability to stream backups (using netcat or socat) to a target destination has many uses, for example, 1)We do not need to store a backup locally on the database server 2) We can stream backups into object storage using GCSFUSE.
• The hot-backup functionality is probably the most important function. We are able to take backups of our primary instances with minimal impact on the database instance.
• XtraBackup has many parameters that can be tuned, allowing us to increase performance or reduce by using the parallel thread parameter for example.
• Partial backups.
• The ease of use when doing restores. Simplified, fast and accurate.

• The granular restore tool for exchange, which is needed to restore a specific email rather than an entire mailbox, is a bit combersome. I wish the tool was incorporated into the 'normal' restore features.
• The inline replication process is very sensitive to available bandwidth. And if bandwidth between source and replication site becomes overused, inline replication fails and 'regular' replication takes its place. I wish inline replication was a bit less 'touchy' and would have a built in 'pause' to allow for the clearing of bandwidth before it fails over to 'regular' replication.

Incentivized

• Remote execution: Xtrabackup doesn't support remote backup. The backup process has to run locally and have to store data locally.
• LifeCycle management: Xtrabackup doesn't support backup lifecycle management. Users have to manage it themself.
• Stability for large databases.

Carbonite Server Backup does not integrate or support any reporting; it is not good at it. We required monthly and quarterly reports for audit. If we fail in that we get fined or we have to pay a certain amount of money to customer. It does not support cloud instances and we are using N2WS for the cloud instances. This is an additional burden for customers.

Incentivized

Product needs a lot of improvements in some features like Cloud and Reporting.

Incentivized

Takes a bit of getting used to when you first set it up.

Incentivized

Some of the requests we could not get resolved on time. They took a long time to provide the reason for the issue we had raised.

Incentivized

Great support, detailed online documentation, and examples in many scenarios. Bugs can be logged and are tracked. Great community support has been built-up due to Percona XtraBackup being a great product. Frequent releases ensure bug fixes are committed as soon as possible. Over and above this, the development team stays up to date with the latest releases of MySQL and ensures it is 100% reliable.

We had appliance and we just needed to setup the Director Console which was straight forward and easy.

Incentivized

Carbonite Server's direction wasn't really for cloud companies as they are more specialized in robust local backup services. I'm a novice when it comes to server backups and replication, but have learned and picked up a lot from talking to the customer center compared to Veeam where it's mostly just self-learning reading lots of documentation which could be overwhelming at times. We started using Veeam as most of our on-prem servers are ceasing operations as we slowly transition to the cloud. I would still use Carbonite as a fall-back option just in case the cloud fails us. Our company cannot afford to have downtimes as we work closely with a lot of contractors and every minute counts.

Incentivized

Percona XtraBackup saves us time and money. Besides the performance and reliability, the support and documentation are top-notch. It's not just about the cost savings, but about the functionality and the minimal impact that XtraBackup has on the database server during a backup window. Percona XtraBackup has been integrated into Percona XtraDB Cluster which makes adding nodes easy and fast.

• While EVault can become expensive if you have a lot of data to store, but you have to keep in mind that it does not cost you anything more to restore your data in the event of an emergency. Some systems give you a great upfront cost, until you actually need to retrieve your data.

Incentivized

• It is free and the best backup tool that I know of. Using this for free means we save on having to purchase other backup software.
• As a DBA it is the standard backup tool that is used everywhere I have been.

Incentivized