afi.ai vs. Cove Data Protection

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.

Solarwinds Backup is ideal for individuals looking to keep a consistent backup of devices in their environment. We used it primarily for networking equipment. It is easy to set up, as it is one of the steps available when adding a new device to solarwinds. It is probably not an ideal product to use for long-term (1 month+) backups.

Incentivized

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

• Daily backups are easy to create and activate and run on schedule as desired by the client.
• Easy SQL backups no matter your SQL favor, it's just a few clicks to back them up.
• Very good system state backups that several of our older clients have used (out of necessity) to recover systems and data from dead machines.

Incentivized

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

• To perform restores on a different location, there's a need to install a standalone application call the Recovery Console, which makes it too much trouble. Instead, this should have been performed over the same backup management portal, where you should have been able to select in which location you want to restore.
• The business continuity features, available for the system state backups, like restoring a backup as a virtual machine or performing a bare-metal restore, also require to install different standalone applications for each. And in disaster scenarios, both tasks take too much time to get everything running.
• The retention of the backups (the archiving feature) needs to be set up individually for each server at a time, when this is something that should be more easily managed by the service provider (not expecting to be set up by the customer in each device) as a general setting within the Backups Profiles or Product Management.
• There should be a better reporting tool, that would allow to export backup and restore events, as well as user activities.
• The configurations for Backup Profiles and Product Management could be redundant and confusing.

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.

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.

Cove Data Protection is very usable as it's easy to tell that it is made to not only do backup very well, but it's also easy to deploy. The agent-based deployment allows for flexible deployment options while ensuring a minimal amount of manual work is needed on the dashboard end. Recovery is also very easy, especially as it relates to one-off file recovery

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.

We have an Italian support partner, they are been very good b7y the first moment.

All the partners are followed with a lot of attention, even the little ones.

there is a site where you can learn everything, the single parts of the product are described perfectly.

Every it specialist should evaluate it.

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.

Solarwinds Backup provides the most comprehensive backup system. After testing all other systems the weaknesses of Solarwinds Backup are much less severe or risky compared to others. As well the overall cost of Solarwinds Backup's value is the main reason for choosing Solarwinds Backup as the primary backup/DR provider.

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.

• I can't speak to every dollar and cent involved, but I can tell you that the daily task of checking backup status has changed from at least an hour just to check VEEAM and Windows Backup statuses for multiple clients, to checking two pages and then digging into any problems. So as far as productivity goes, it's been wonderful!

Incentivized