Backup and Recovery Software: IT Pros Weigh In

How can enterprise IT professionals know which data backup and recovery software to choose for their business? There are numerous products on the market for this critical data center function.

Peer reviews published by real users facilitate this software decision-making with user feedback, insight, and product rankings that collectively indicate which solutions are in the lead. With this knowledge, potential users are equipped to choose the product offering best-suited to their organizational needs.

Based on real user reviews at IT Central Station, these five products are some of the top data backup and recovery solutions on the market. The reviews from IT pros provide valuable insight into the products' benefits and shortcomings.

Veeam Backup

Chris C., a systems engineer at a business law firm, shared this perspective: “With moving the Veeam server to a physical server and creating a proxy server on each of the hosts, we are able to leverage SAN-based backup, which is very fast. Jobs are completed overnight and never run into the business hours.”

Alberto Z., a senior IT engineer at a tech company, noted an area for improvement: “Determining the space for the WAN acceleration server sometimes is hard, especially if you have many source sites for the data. I would like to have a kind of storage space calculator that gives me an estimate for the size of the WAN accelerator server we are creating; give it a list of VMs to be backed up.”

Read more Veeam Backup reviews by IT Central Station users.

HPE Data Protector

Darren O., systems engineer at a biotech company, provided this review of HPE Data Protector: “The granularity of brick-level restore functionality is very valuable. We receive approximately 10 restore requests on a daily basis for your typical file/folder restore, with the odd Exchange mailbox restore request thrown in, just to keep me on my toes.”

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A systems and data services leader at a financial services firm who goes by the handle HeadOfSy6f42 said he would like to have more capacity. "This can be done by having more deduplication and compression. If they can compress the data more and more, we will save more space," he noted.

Read more HPE Data Protector reviews by IT Central Station users.

Asigra

Guy N., CEO at a tech services firm, cited  two primary improvements in the Asigra platform with the recent version 13.1 SP1:

He also provided insight about the Asigra’s cost and licensing features:

“It is important to be perfectly knowledgeable about Asigra's pricing model. It is somewhat more complex that other backup vendors, but it includes a huge opportunity for savings, especially with their recovery license model (RLM).”

Read more Asigra reviews by IT Central Station users. 

Altaro VM Backup

IT support engineer Vasileios P. offered this view: “Simplicity and reliability. I had some difficulties activating the product, but after the activation phase all went smooth...I could create VM backups from live machines without any issues. The restore process also was very quick.”

However, Chaim K., CEO of a tech services company, said he needs “to be able to restore emails to Exchange Live not just to a PST. This is a major drawback as I want to be able to restore individual items or mailboxes directly into my live Exchange databases so the user can see the email right away.”

Read more Altaro VM Backup reviews by IT Central Station users.

Commvault

Dan G., senior system administrator for a healthcare organization, wrote that Commvault’s “most valuable feature is the ability to backup over the dedicated Fiber Channel directly from SAN. There's no impact to the network or users...Backups happen overnight instead of three days. Storage for backups has been reduced by 60%.”

He added that the “bare-metal restore needs some work. It's not intuitive and seems to have been an afterthought.”

Read more Commvault reviews by IT Central Station users.