Carbonite Server vs. Unitrends

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

Application restorations will be tested fully automatically
and measures what the actual recovery time is and what the recovery points are.
It's analysis compliance with service-level agreements and also identifies any potential
threats to data recovery. If the system identifies an issue, then it will
notify the user and will recommend steps for correcting those issues. Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery provides fully automated and customizable dashboards which require less
administrative interaction on a day-to-day process.

Incentivized

• 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 setup of the device is very straightforward and simple. It's not confusing when configuring the backup device.
• Adding assets to the system is very easy. The Unitrends agent that enables the backup of devices is simple to install. Once it is installed, you move on to creating a job for backing up the asset, which is also simple to setup.
• Looking at the whether backup jobs are successful has a well laid out UI. You can filter by almost anything you want to find specific jobs or assets to check on the backups that were made.

Incentivized

• 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

• When attempting to do a restore, it is a bit clunky on the process. While when it is completed it does work, but kind of confusing, especially on your first attempt.
• We had to back up not only AD servers, mixed environment of stand-alone and VM's we also still had Netware servers that required a backup. It was a bit more tedious setting the Novell servers up for backup. A cleaner install for Netware would be nice, but not sure how big of an issue that will be since it is less used (Netware).
• Unitrends and VMware work well with snapshots, but it needs to be emphasized that in some instances you need to REMOVE any existing snapshots of a server before you do different tasks, or it will not work at all.

Incentivized

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

I am 100% likely to renew my Unitrends support and keep my appliance. I don't see any products that have come close to being able to do the on-prem and cloud backups with the ease of Unitrends. This is a great tool and I can't imagine someone wanting to implement anything else.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Unitrends is simpler that most other appliances but I believe there is some room for improvement. The backup wizards could be simpler and retention rates need to be easier to understand. The registration of appliances with the appliance can be frustrating. Once the appliance is setup to backup the various machines it is a breeze to administer.

Incentivized

The appliances have been there when we need them and have rarely if ever gone down. Hardware issues have been resolved quickly.

Incentivized

The hardware is adequate and speedy. The user interface responds quickly. Backups complete quickly.

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

They're incredible, attentive, thorough. They make sure my issue is resolved and follow up. I'm usually behind on giving them a reply or an update. They have always gone above and beyond for me, and I'll continue to do the same for them.

Incentivized

It was sufficient to get started. It was not super deep. We called support often to get going.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We were contacted by Unitrends and they scheduled a training/install/configuration session with us. They were more than happy to answer any questions we had and we arranged an additional session with them to help us with the archiving. The implementation went very well with no major issues.

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

While all of the products I evaluate could do the job and I have experience with them all, Unitrends' solution is just easier and more affordable. All solutions have negatives, but Unitrends' are so easy to live with that I had no reason to make a change. I'd also put their support up against anyone. You can almost always get someone if you need them, but I almost never need help.

Incentivized

Once you exceed the capacity of the appliances, you have to forklift a new appliance. This is very expensive.

Incentivized

• 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

• The security of disaster recovery is important, and Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery helps us
• We went with cheaper alternatives for less important data
• The large cost keeps us from utilizing Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery in a larger capacity

Incentivized