It may be cheap but the system stuck in the 90's, the UI\UX are not as you will expected. The alerts are not provide reliable evidence and human supervision is needed constantly. The system not knowing how to backup automatically the secondary server in the availability group, you need to configure that explicitly.
When you're adding a new SQL server, sometimes the install from the management server to the SQL server will fail. I'm guessing this happens because of some version difference in Windows components or similar. Not a huge deal because you can just copy the agent to the SQL server and install it there, but considering how easy everything else is, I would expect this to be a little more fluid.
I ran into a situation where part of our business decided to move their servers to a third-party data center. When they took away a SQL server that I was managing with SQL Safe, anything having to do with that policy took forever. Click. Wait 10 minutes. Window reacts. I'm guessing this is because the Management Console is trying super hard to contact the server in question, but I wish it handled losing a server better than it does.
SQL Safe is the first managed backup solution I've used. Before SQL Safe I used SQL's native backup mechanism and scheduling. And as an extension of that I used Ola Hallengren's SQL Server Maintenance Solution (which is a set of scripts that take amazing advantage of SQL's native capabilities). However whenever changes were needed (moving backups to new storage, adding/removing a server), it just took a long time because I had to touch each server. With SQL Safe, I can seriously change the backup location of every server I have by changing one policy setting. Likewise, I can quickly add or remove a server from being backed up with a few simple clicks.
SQL Safe allows me to spend less time managing my DR plan and still maintain confidence that my backups and restores are solid. Saving my time means saving money.
SQL Safe does an amazing job at backup compression over and above SQL's native compression. SQL backups are probably our single largest consumer of network drive space. Any product that helps reduce my network footprint, saves money.
