Backblaze Business Backup vs. Cohesity

Backblaze's "set it and forget it' interface is ideal for home users. In addition, the $50/year pricing is very competitive. Most business should find Backblaze as a very good backup solution, but in cases where a backup archive needs to be kept indefinitely, alternative solutions should be looked at (specifically CrashPlan - though it is significantly more expensive at $10/month).

Incentivized

Cohesity is very well suited to protecting virtualised workloads and is a significant improvement over IBM Spectrum Protect which we’ve replaced by Cohesity. We also protect a Netapp workload and whilst the on-prem side works really well careful planning of protection jobs is needed if you’ll be archiving these to Cloud.

• Backblaze offers unlimited backups for a low-low cost per computer. Essentially, it's $5 for an all you can eat back-up buffet.
• The interface is simple - both on the computer side when you're configuring it. But more importantly, the online interface to search through your stored data is simple and efficient. Once you find what you're missing you can restore via downloading a zipped archive, requesting a USB drive, or you can have large data loaded onto a hard drive.
• It has never let me down - which in the world of remote back-up is amazing.

• The simplicity of the solution and the support behind implementation, training, and continued support.
• The implementation and training are all done through the sales engineer, which provides for a seamless and great experience when it comes to starting with a new vendor.
• How fast the solution works. When it comes to implementation (which is done in an hour or so) to backups, to actual recoveries, everything is just quick.

• Backblaze, once installed, resides in the app tray on the lower right of windows. It's just a small menu that takes you to your website to perform recovery operations. You also have to install their little download and unzipping app after you select files to restore. I would like to see a single backup and restore interface that runs locally and handles all those details in the background.
• If you have to reinstall your computer, they additionally setup and charge you for a new license, even though you have an account, you can't simply log in and reconnect to it. I didn't find this out until I saw the charge on my credit card. Now that I have the data I need downloaded, I have to call them and have the original license canceled for a pro-rated (partial) credit. I was told this is how system administrators preferred to minimize downtime. As a small business owner, I found it irritating.

Incentivized

• Reporting could always be better- executive-style reports have to be generated from data at multiple points.
• Some tasks that could be brought to the UI that today we have to call support on (for example when an NFS mount is still active but we cannot see it from the UI)

We have been very pleased with this backup solution. It is fast and reliable, and supports our VMware infrastructure. The company's support has been great, including proactively replacing our nodes when the flash memory was reporting high wear. Support is offered on-shore as well. We plan on continuing to use this product for the foreseeable future.

The only bad thing about Backblaze B2 is that to use it to its full ability, you need a third party to truly get any use out of it and its cheap price because they don't have their own software. Now, on the desktop endpoint back-up for non-B2 storage, they have a fantastic client with unlimited back-ups that is only $6 per month.

Incentivized

The Cohesity platform with its user interface is easy to implement, rack space-saving, and easy to use on a daily business basis. Backup jobs and policies are easy to define, multiple machines and objects can be grouped for the same tasks. In general, Cohesity makes backup admins' lives much easier.

I've never had to reach out to customer support, but their periodic emails letting me know if a device is missing are very nice for informing me when something is wrong. Based on how helpful their system is, I would imagine their customer support is top-notch.

Incentivized

Support is quick to respond but lacks that ongoing responsiveness if the issue is not simple. There will be large gaps in replies if they need to resort to escalation and when there are timezone differences between yourself and the person who picked up the ticket.

content was good and hands on lab to get the live feel of the application

Incentivized

I previously used CrashPlan before they pivoted their business model. CrashPlan was fine, and has feature parity with Backblaze. I was motivated to move from CrashPlan to Backblaze for 2 reasons - 1, as they pivoted, they increased their cost, which was frustrating, and 2, because they had always had a java-based client that wasn't as performant as a native client. Backblaze is so unobtrusive because of its highly performant client, and I couldn't be happier.

Incentivized

We looked at Veeam and although it's a great product when we priced out the licensing of both primary and disaster datacenters it became much too expensive. Rubrik is a great product and very similar to Cohesity. In the end, Cohesity had a secondary storage play as well as a better UI and better compatibility with lower tier cloud storage. We also like the way Cohesity did protection jobs vs Rubrik's virtual machine centric backup. CommVault is a product we still use today due to its massive features and the ability for bare metal backups. Cohesity does a much better job in the area of UI simplicity, virtual backup ease, and ease of management.

Incentivized

• The Backblaze service has provided a huge return on investment. We had a system fail, and it was very easy to have a drive with the backup data shipped to us for recovery.
• The service has been very cost effective, allowing us to keep costs down while maintaining a good system integrity.

Incentivized

• Cost savings from having to purchase and manage physical tapes, as well as the man-hours to swap them in and out and store them off site.
• Extremely fast recovery times, can bring up a restored VM back in our environment in under a minute. Get back up and running much quicker.
• Simplifies our disaster recovery strategy.
• Initial cost can be pricey depending on your storage needs.