Designed to be simple to configure and manage, the scalable Barracuda Backup solution is offered via a capacity-based, all-inclusive subscription model allows you to pay for only what you need to protect today, avoiding large upfront hardware costs.
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Hornetsecurity VM Backup
Score 7.2 out of 10
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Hornetsecurity VM Backup (formerly Altaro) is a backup and replication solution for Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. VM Backup can manage large infrastructures, with the revamped backup repository providing long-term storage and more efficient use of disk space.
When we have looked for a VM backup solution we've tried some other competitors, even to backup just data and not all VM. We've tested Acronis backup that is a complete solution but more expensive and more complicated, we've also tried Nakivo but didn't convince us the …
If you are a small business with a few machines and your backups aren't of servers that are public facing. If you had to restore a server from backup, it would take a day at least. So, if the server being restored was public facing, that may impact customer relations.
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.
The cloud control is great!! I'm able to restore files and folders from basically any machine on the Internet. I can restore either the local machine I'm using at the time, or directly to the server from which it came.
The user interface. Very easy to use and understand. Loads of options and configurations you can optimize for your particular needs.
Instance replacement. We have had an issue with one unit due to some hardware failure. Barracuda was amazing on getting this replaced quickly and getting us back on track.
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.
You can't define backup systems to just go to the cloud, it has to be stored locally as well, which eats up the local storage.
These appliances are high-priced for a small amount of storage and if you want to upgrade, you buy a new appliance. There's no replacing hard drives, you basically move up $5K for each 2Tb and replace the entire appliance each time. It's not a healthy model for growth.
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.
Dashboards and interfaces within Barracuda Backup are very easy to navigate, with clear success/warnings shown. Setting up backup jobs is probably one of the most simplest tasks - compared to competitors we trialed. Trouble shooting backup issues is also simple due to clear errors (VSS errors shown in a understandable format for example)
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
They are always quick to get you routed to a tech support person and always get follow up after contacting them. Last experience was amazing, she adjusted my boxes and they perform even better. I cannot say enough about the support. We had some trouble with one of the windows servers leaving the volume shadow copy out there and would fail. They worked with us to adjust and get working. After that it has been months since I have had to do anything with the server to keep the backups running.
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.
The time necessary to manage Barracuda Backups is leaps and bounds superior to Backup Exec. Backup Exec has tons of great features but required constant maintenance. In the end we just wanted the ability to easily schedule, set retention periods and the ability to backup and restore. Barracuda does this exceptionally well.
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.
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.
