BDRSuite Backup & Replication Reviews

We use it to backup VMware virtual machines, so I'm backing up my VMware environment. My product is for Windows Server Backup.

We are a small business. We don't use the enterprise version of the solution.

It has improved our business continuity.

We have used this solution to recover from a few incidences. 

The firewall backup is the most valuable feature. We need it sometimes when we recover a single file.

The compression is the most useful feature for me.

The product's stability needs some improvements. 

The support is a bit slow in resolving an issue. It takes a long time to recover.

One year.

The solution is 90 percent stable. It is running well. The availability is good.

Two or three employees are needed for deployment and maintenance of the solution.

I only have two servers. I don't test other servers.

We don't count our users for this solution as it is a backup service.

I would rate the technical support as eight or nine (out of 10). I would like them to improve their response rate.

This was our first product.

The initial setup was neither simple nor complex; it was intermediate. It took four hours to set up/deploy. We implemented it into a very simple environment (Windows Server Backup).

We deployed it ourselves.

We have seen ROI with Vembu. The solution is worth it based on the few times that we used it for recovery.

We tested three products. One of the other products that we evaluated was Altaro.

We chose Vembu because the compatibility was better.

I would definitely recommend Vembu. We have been mostly satisfied with the solution. We plan to keep using it.

Overall, I would rate the product as a nine (out of 10).

Our whole environment is virtualized except for a couple of servers which are still physical. So I primarily use this for backing up my physical servers. I do an image backup as well as a file-level backup.

The main improvement is the compression, the space. I back up one particular server with close to 1.2 TB, and the way the software compresses it is close to 600 or 700 TB. Vembu compresses it to close to 450 gigabytes, that's gigabytes. So that’s really amazing, the way in which the backup compression happens. It creates a lot of space in my storage. I’m saving almost 50 percent of my file storage space, SAN. that’s one of the key features of this.

One thing I’m very much impressed by is the compression ratio. The rate at which it compresses the data during backup is really very good. In fact, I’d say it’s better than Symantec Backup Exec. I have Backup Exec, in my environment, and I have Veeam. Symantec is now Veritas, so I have played with all the backups, but the way in which this handles the compression is really one of the key features.

It’s also very, very stable. I haven’t made any changes to it. I just installed and it’s working. I restored a couple of times, and everything seems to be fine.

I do have one suggestion for them. The process is a bit cumbersome when you remove an agent, delete that job, and add the agent to the same server. Even though the agent is already installed in that server, the system does not recognize it. We have to uninstall the current agent, restart the server, install the push agent - a new agent - and then restart the server. I think they should try to avoid that. Symantec doesn’t work that way. You push the agent once, the agent stays in the server for good.

It’s very stable. I don't have any issues because it’s automated. The moment a backup is completed we all get an email. First thing in the morning, we check those emails and it’s on top of it.

I’m not going to scale with this because I’m primarily using it for physical servers.

Maybe my next project will be, when my Veeam support runs out, to try using Vembu - because Veeam is very expensive - for backing up my virtual servers and let's see how things are going to work.

Support is very good. When you call them or send out a support email, immediately someone responds. It’s really good. They come back with an answer immediately. There has never been a time where they said they wanted to do some research on it. The moment I send them an issue, the guys fix it immediately.

Before Vembu I was using Symantec (which is now Veritas). The main reason I switched is the price point, the cost. Vembu cost me one-third of what Veritas was charging me for backing up the three servers.

The setup is straightforward. The only problem is, if I delete the server from my backup list and I want to add the server back, that is complex.

It is very cost efficient, effective. I’d say it's one-third the cost of Veritas when compared to the server backups. I even tried image backups on Acronis, but Acronis is very expensive. So these are some of the key reasons why I opted for it.

Licensing is straightforward, it’s simple, they should keep it the way they have right now.

There is no need for any advice. A person who has infrastructure and backup experience should be able to do it. It doesn’t require any special knowledge for the configuration part or reinstalling.

I rate it at eight out of 10 because of the complexity involved in reinstalling that agent.

Buy, install it, use it, back it up, that’s it. It works fine.

We are using the Enterprise version for backup. With the license that we have now, I'm using the NetworkBackup application. This includes having email backup with MS Exchange Server, which is very helpful because we can restore by mailbox or mail. We don't have to restore the entire server.

We also have FAS, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and MySQL databases. It is very easy to use with them.

I have some virtual machines. I use an VMware ESXi server to back them up.

I have a strategy in the company where everyone needs to bring all their important files on the server. People should not be keeping their folders on their computer because of two types of situations:

1. In the last two months, there were situations where the local hard drive failed, people were very happy to have their files on the server. 
2. There have been three times where people modified the file, then asked me if it's possible to get back the file that they had before, so I used the backup. 

I just started backing up to virtual machines. They are very good if something happens. I can restore to another site. There are a lot of options to restore with virtual machines, such as, mounting on another server to open mount locally and extracting some files. I was very surprised because it seems like we have a lot of options. 

I was very happy seeing that the incremental backup was very nice because the modified files are taken from the number of times it was modified. Thus, if I have a file I modified two years ago, I don't back it up each time.

It backs up from the latest version. I can write there that I need the last three modified images of the file. One image could be from a year ago, another one or two days ago, and the third from three years ago. It does not delete by date.

It is easy to use. There is an offsite DR solution where I can keep an offsite copy of the backups. 

The transfer is encrypted. I checked the storage pool's compression and not a lot of space was used. I was expecting more, which is why I think the compression is good.

I saw that it's not possible to have the last full backup duplicated on our site. Therefore, if I have a lot of information on the main site, I would not want to copy any information to those site servers. It would be nice to be able to make a copy of the last full backup. 

I have sent a lot of missed scheduled emails, but maybe I'm doing something wrong. I will try contacting support to see what I can do better. 

I started two months ago. 

Nothing has happened other than expected until now. We have had no errors.

A system administrator and I are doing deployment and maintenance. He checks the tasks every day.

It's 100 percent scalable because we can add as many servers as we want. 

Their support is great. I think they work 24 hours a day. I get a very quick turnaround time from them no matter the day or time that I send them an email.

A long time ago, I used Symantec Backup. I cannot compare the two solutions.

I was trying to find a backup solution two months ago. I googled for the best backup solution vendors in 2020. I saw Vembu. It was listed as very easy to use and cheap for what it's doing, as a platform. I started a trial (pilot). When I checked the license prices, it was free which was in my budget. I was really happy to find that someone from a management location could do backups using the service.

The price for Vembu was very important and key to our decision-making. Also, Vembu support was very important. When I didn't know how to do anything, I wrote to support and the response time was quick. Basically, it was cheap, easy to install, the agentless backup was very nice, and support was very responsive

The initial setup was very easy. It integrated easily with Windows, Linux, and NetApp backup.

The deployment took about one hour (max) per server.

This solution helps us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduces budgets. 

With the free version of Vembu, you receive three virtual machine backups. However, if you buy the NetworkBackup Enterprise version, you don't have access to the features seen in the free version. This is a situation that Vembu should solve. This caused a misunderstanding between sales and us. I was hoping if I buy the licenses, then after the trial I would not have to purchase virtual machine licenses. Maybe they should offer these three virtual machine backups as part of the Enterprise license.

I tried to install two other solutions. However, I found Vembu very nice because in its trial period, it includes all the features. During the trial period, I was able to check exactly what happens if I use another type of solution from Vembu, and it was easy to test.

I chose this backup solution because it fits what I need.

Try it and see what it can deliver. It is very easy to test and check the licenses. 

The only situation that was not what I expected: I need to have a full copy of the backup, plus a live session of the back up which involves a lot of copies. I need a lot of hard drive capacity offshore and offsite.

I don't know how to check the deduplication.

I have approximately 50 clients for whom I provide backup services using Vembu software.

I don't have a virtual environment.

I use the encryption, and I think my clients feel secure knowing that.

I have a couple of examples where I was able to restore a client's data on the spot. This definitely was a success for me, where my client saw how the solution actually works in cases where they would need to retrieve their data when a failure happens. It doesn't happen very often, but it has happened a couple of times.

The only things that I use it for are file backup and SQL backup. I don't do much beyond that. It is pretty much straight file backups and restores. What I like about these features are the ease of installation and automatic scheduling. I do like the email feature where I am able to email the client and myself directly after each backup whether it's been successful, partially backed up, or failed.

I am very pleased with the compression, especially with some of the larger SQL databases that need backup. The amount of compression is impressive.

The reporting can use some improvement. I still use the old StoreGrid Cloud while I'm migrating the rest of my clients over. I am able to export all of my clients' usage for the month, which I then import into my billing program. It helps me speed up the billing process. Also, I can generate a report that gives me statuses of everyone's backup, which I don't get from Vembu Backup Online either. I would like to have something similar where I can export everyone's usage at any time for all their backups, so I can use that to import them to my billing program. 

I would also like to be able to have a report where I can check the status of everyone's backup. Right now, I have it programmed to where I get an email for every backup sent to me. Then, I read those emails and chart them on an Excel spreadsheet separately: success, failure, etc. I keep a weekly log of that. If I had a report, it would make this process a lot easier.

I used to be able to manage the amount of space allocated to each client. Right now, I can't. I have to send in a request if I want to add space to this one or create space for another.

I like the stability. I have been pleased with it.

I have had some things that I've contacted technical support about and they have corrected them. I was surprised because I was running across multiple problems frequently. It's been pretty good lately, but the problem was with the cloud.

It is very simple to add new backups.

I am the only person using it in my company.

I have about 50 clients that have on average about one to two backups. There are almost 100 individual backup schedules which are running.

I support an environment of approximately five to seven terabytes.

I would like to add more clients going forward.

I am very pleased with Vembu's technical support.

I have asked Vembu technical support how to handle the following scenario and haven't gotten a good answer:

I have a couple of clients who are pretty large (a couple of terabytes). If I ever had to restore that, it would take quite a long time. I would like some suggestions on where to maybe physically backup on their location. Then, am I sending that up to the cloud? If I were to restore, could I restore right from their location locally? Since that would be much quicker.

This was my first backup solution.

The initial setup is straightforward: Creating a client and logging into that client on their workstation, then being able to download the software to that machine and setting it up whether it's a regular file backup or SQL. This has become very simple for me after doing it so many times.

The initial setup does not take very long. The only thing is that it is taking me a while to migrate my clients from StoreGrid Cloud over to Online Backup because of access to my clients. Once I get in, the actual setup probably takes me 20 minutes to a half an hour per client.

The implementation is pretty much the same for a lot of my clients because they are from the same type of industry. I have a lot of dentists. I'm pretty familiar with the software that they use. I know when I go in there what to expect and what I should be backing up.

I have a gentleman who gives the IT support to a lot of dentists in my area. As he goes to the different locations where he might either be replacing a server there, or if it's a new client of his, then he'll contact me and I will remote in. I will install the backup software on their server, and we set it up that way for the most part.

I have seen ROI with Vembu.

The pricing is reasonable. I am okay with it.

I did look at other backup solutions as well. I don't remember who they are.

It is an easy solution as far as its installation, scalability, and dependability. I have a regular full-time job as well as doing this. I can count on this solution working properly, and it allows me to be able to have another side income without a whole lot of hands-on everyday maintenance to it.

I have not used Vembu with Microsoft Hyper-V.

Our primary use case is for VM backups.

We were using an older version and just upgraded two weeks ago.

The virtual machine backup is important for stability and scalability since our servers are on virtual machines. 

Another good thing is that it has cloud backup.

There are bugs. For one month, I encountered a big issue where my storage pool could not be identified. My backups were stopped because they were not able to locate the storage pool. So, I removed the settings and started the backups again. The application is not stable. It needs some debugging and testing on the build side of production.

We use Vembu with Microsoft Hyper-V. While the installation is not a problem, there is a problem with the operation side of things. It should be automated. There is something wrong with the structure affecting the product because the backup should not be disturbed. We found without any changes to the network structure then the backups would be affected and I could not fix it by myself. I did not contact support for this, as it was probably due to the new update, but I am unsure. Now, I am monitoring this issue.

Six months.

Its application stability needs improvement. I have seen issues recently with it. Backups must have a very stable application. If your backup system is crashing, that means you cannot trust it.

The scalability is good. It can scale. Adding a new server to a foreign location is easy.

We have nine locations. We do have plans to increase usage of the solution. 

The IT department has five people who are administrators. One person configures the backups and others monitor the backups.

The technical support is good.

This BDR is the first proper solution that we are using. We previously used manual backups.

Initially, we had some problems when we tried to do the setup ourselves, but then the support helped us. They had a direct session with me and helped me with the installation. After that, it was fine.

The deployment is easy and fast. A location can be deployed in a day.

For each version, we have a dedicated BDR server and local storage. I schedule the backups. From there, we upload to the cloud storage. Therefore, each location will have their own BDR that will back up to the cloud.

The initial deployment to the cloud is important because once the backups are into operations making changes is not that flexible.

This solution helped us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduced our budget by 50 percent. We spent $3,000 on Vembu's licenses where other solutions were almost double.

The competitor for Vembu is Veeam, who is very popular and famous. Vembu is good, but still has a long way to go. We found Vembu BDR to be more affordable.

Veeam is good for very high-end servers.

Right now, we are satisfied with Vembu's operational performance and requirements. It is just a simple backup solution where we can backup all of our VMs.

Vembu allows you to implement a variety of different requirements.

I would rate the product as a six (out of 10). It needs some more work to be done in regards to product stability and functionality.

We back up all our customers' files. We back up only files, and maybe some databases. However, primarily, we are backing up files on our own server.

We are currently using the updated version of this product.

We can create a backup contract with our customers and software using this solution. We can backup the software here in Austria, because we have new rules here in Europe, since last year, which are very strict for data protection. 

The network solution is the most important feature, because we have our own backup server and are doing file backups for our customers.

The compression, encryption and deduplication features are important. If we can save space, it's okay. The encryption is also very important, because it is in our contracts. It is a must. We have to use it for our customers.

We have not been able to move our backups from one drive to another one. We can only create a storage pool. However, if we want to change a drive, it is not possible to delete one drive as long there is data on it. For this, we have to call the support. While they can solve this, it is not out-of-the-box.

If there is a failure, the logging for the backups could be better.

Sometimes, I miss some features from the old solution. 

The stability is very good, but it is not perfect. Sometimes, we have to restart the server, because of updates. I have to sometimes manually restart the services. When it is running, it's perfect and nice. 

When we have to restart the server, then we have some troubles with the services from Vembu. We have to manually restart the services, and afterwards, it's okay.

The software solution is okay. While it has some bugs, it has been okay in most cases. 

It takes me two to five hours to do maintenance per week.

We have small customers. For them, high availability is not a priority, only file backup is important. They are very small. They have around five employees. Also, because our customers are not asking for this, we do not offer high availability. We do not have the resources for it, and our servers are probably not big enough for this type of solution. We only offer the simple file backup.

Our biggest customer has about 20 employees. However, they have a huge amount of data.

We have three users in our company, but we represent about 30 companies. All three employees in our company are systems engineers. We do the backups, deployments, and maintenance.

At the moment, we do not accept new customers because we do not want to grow. We are happy with what we have. We have a lot to do. We have had good customers for a lot of years, and that's perfect.

They have very good support. I always get an answer quite fast when we have trouble. When we write an email, on next day, we will have an answer. This is really good and unusual. I like the support.

Previously, we had only local backup solutions at our customers on tapes. We had trouble all the time with tapes. This was more than 10 years ago. Then, we switched to drives to create the backups at our customers' sites, but all the time these drives were defect. So, we implemented a big server in our company, where we only have to do maintenance on one big device, not on all the small devices at our customers. We searched for a solution, and Vembu was our first choice.

The current version of Vembu is much better now than the previous version. The newer version is nice. It may not have as many features as the older solution, but it is faster and better to administrate. It is a good solution.

The initial setup is easy and very nice. 

The deployment was not a big project. The backup service was running in a few hours. Then, we have only to implement clients at our customers. 

The process is quite fast. We set up a back up server, then alert the clients. We use a Windows Server with a lot of storage capacity. There is no need for an implementation strategy.

We had an old solution with the old clients. We moved them step-by-step as individual customers to the new solution over half a year. 

Only from within the organization was it a little tricky, because we had to implement new contracts for our customers. It was technically a little different with the old solution. We did need a new server. Also, we had to move all our customers to the new solution step-by-step.

The return of investment was very fast, within half a year. 

The best thing about the product is the license management. It is a true managed service provider solution. It has a good price. The licensing is quite flexible, which is one of the most important things for us. 

The high availability is too expensive for our customers.

I did a lot of evaluations before choosing a product. We tested about 20 different products. Vembu was the best. Some of the other solutions were also very good, but were extraordinarily priced (too expensive). Others, I didn't like the licensing, software, or were only cloud solutions. 

Vembu has the flexibility with its licenses and is a real managed service provider solution. My feeling is that Vembu understands what a service provider needs, not only local administrators. It is one of the reasons that why we chose Vembu.

We haven't found another solution for its price with all this features.

I would recommend the product. I already recommend it to our partners. It is a really good solution. I like the product. It has good support. For small companies, it's the perfect solution.

We do not use virtual environments. We have done this in the past, but we do not implement virtual clients anymore since we have only small customers and virtual appliances are now on cloud spaces. So, we do not have virtual servers at our customers.

We have used Hyper-V, but it was not beneficial.

Backing up virtual machines, we use it for Windows Hyper-V platform in one data center, but we've also got future plans for a VMware Hypervisor platform in another data center. So thinking ahead, we chose Vembu.

It hasn't improved things, per se. It's an essential service, done automatically. I would say it is an essential backup system that matches the alternative solutions at the moment in a relatively cost-effective way.

The automated backup of multiple virtual machines. We can back up two hypervisors, one is Microsoft Hyper-V and the other one is VMware Hypervisor.

It is very easy, unless you know exactly what you're doing, to corrupt the virtual machines and they get locked up. Just brief detail: When you are creating a system, if you don't have absolutely every other little background processes in place, it creates Snapshots of the virtual machines. Once it does that, it then won't be able to have a backup. From that point on you have to destroy the virtual machine, which is completely counterproductive on a large system. There is a fundamental flaw in the setup that can be very dangerous, potentially. So that needs to be avoided; whoever writes the software for doing that needs to make sure that that cannot happen.

I have fed that back to the developers. I don't know whether they're going to make that change, but they can't put that responsibility onto customers. It's their software that needs to be able to not allow that to happen. I've not had any response to say, "Yes, we'll do it." So that's a little bit of a fault as well. When we do give feedback we don't get any commitment. Like this survey, we're being asked the questions, but when we give feedback, we don't actually get any response at all.

When it's backing up, it's okay. We've used it to restore the system and that restore system worked. We get an email report on various operations, so we know if something has failed or not. It's operating fine.

We've not encountered any trouble with scalability.

Their tech support is okay, but they don't respond in time to sort out the problem. We sorted it out ourselves. We fed back the answer. There wasn't any thank you. There wasn't any acknowledgment. There wasn't even any appreciation of what we'd actually done, something like, "Yeah, yeah, you shouldn't have done that." That kind of thing. Very basic support. There is a willingness to help and respond, but in actually solving the problem, they're not very good at all.

Then, once we did solve it, there was no understanding of what had been done, so it's at that level that it is lacking. This issue was over New Year's time. I was actually on holiday in India. I had to waste a whole day rebuilding a system from a corrupt backup. And again, no support from the Vembu guys, at all. Once we showed them what had been done, again, no acknowledgment that they'd safeguard this in the future.

It has been several months now and I'm not in a position to be chasing them to improve the product in that way. So it's still there, in potential, for future Vembu customers to hit the problem that we had and they might not be as tolerant or be able to fix it. We're an IT company ourselves, so we do understand the nature of the software that they're running and the problems, but there are major flaws in the design at set up time.

We haven't actually switched. We do use Microsoft Azure backup systems. We've used our own online backup systems. We've used in-built data center backup solutions a well, so there are a number of solutions. All of them have their weak points. The Vembu one is working and it's stable.

We had problems, initially in setting it up. There was a major bug and the backup process, it corrupted one of our virtual machines which was a live customer system. That wasn't very good. Now that has been sorted and we know how to avoid it, but at the beginning, it wasn't a good system. It has been fixed and it has been working fine since.

It was supposed to be straightforward but it caused major technical issues that were difficult to fix. They were actually unfixable, the problems. We had to basically destroy live production systems.

Pricing is a good value.

Licensing seems okay. I suppose the more volume you put through the system, it would be good to have a volume licensing discount. We're a managed IT service provider, so we're backing up not just our own systems but all our clients'. In that regard, as we grow, we're putting business through Vembu. There is not any specific partner incentive at all. So that would be nice to see.

Microsoft Azure. I can't remember the others but there were a few; the data center ones, but I haven't got specific names. The in-built ones in VMware.

When you do a search on Google about half a dozen pop up and we looked at some of them. With some of them were put off by their business models. So even before we evaluated them, their business models weren't acceptable. The nice thing about Vembu is the subscription, on a monthly basis. It fits into our business models.

I would tell others looking into implementing this solution exactly what steps need to be done in the setup. I've actually documented it, and I've passed that on to the Vembu guys. Take that, and make sure that things are set up very clearly, not, "There you go, it's very straightforward, it'll take you five minutes." It's not like that at all. The marketing of the setup is so misleading. It can cause a lot of problems. They need to be more honest in the way things need to be set up. That would be okay, that doesn't put people off when you have to go through a process. But just saying it's straightforward and it's simple is a bit of a lie, especially if it causes a lot of problems. So there needs to be more documentation on exactly what to set up in what order, and how to do it and what not to do.

Regarding technical support, sometimes, if you pick the wrong time of day to get through you get this constant "We value your business, we're busy at the moment..." and you can be on the phone for ages because it gets redirected to America. You get the feeling that they're not actually busy, they just have some automated lady giving you a message. Again, that engenders mistrust in the technology. It needs to be not advertised as 24/7. It needs to be advertised with the specific hours that support can be provided. That would help a lot, not just saying 24/7 and then not actually providing it.

It goes to America, but it is actually answered in India. It's all confusing. If it's 3 o'clock in India, we understand that they'll be asleep, so why not say we operate at these times, and people will understand that, rather than pretending redirect to an American number, where you're expecting somebody to pick up the phone. But they're picking it up from India at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's forced us to be hanging on to the phone for a long time, while nobody has got any intention of picking up the phone.

In terms of my rating of the solution, I have to do so on two levels. The first is the implementation and that would be a two out of 10. It was bad. But in terms of once it's operating, I would give it a nine.

We have, in-house, around 70 end-users and around 30 branches. Currently, We are using Vembu to do the daily backup of our in-house end points. 

As data is increasing day by day, taking and managing backup is a hard job. As IT personnel, we were looking for a solution where we could do auto backups for all our machines and restore them at any point in time as required. 

Vembu came to us and solved our problems in the backup space. In the next phase, we are looking to deploy it for our remote branch users. It's a great solution.

It made it easy for us to handle the daily backup of endpoints. Earlier, we had to manually do everything, and that was also not in real-time and involved engagement of one IT person's time. 

Vembu saved us time and manpower. It helped our organization to secure valuable data within the organization. 

Concern related to the data of individuals has been resolved as personal data is removed from the backup. Only data related to the company is taken. This also has reduced the storage space required.

The auto-scheduling of incremental backups and multiple retention points features has helped us to get the backups of endpoints without any intervention. Multiple retention points help us to restore data from multiple points and states. 

The reporting is great for noting the success and failure. If it fails it gives the reason why it failed and we can take action accordingly and resolve the issues. 

Mail notification helps us in monitoring the backups daily. All failures are sent through to us so that we can check and take action as required.

The backup and restoration should be faster in newer releases. 

The dashboard should more interactive. 

Responsiveness to any command has to improve. Currently, it takes some time to respond the commands like abort or suspend.

They need to centralize the configuration and management features for File folder backups from endpoints. This should be in the next releases.

The reporting feature is good, however, it can still be improved upon.

We are eagerly awaiting these features in the next releases. We hope we will get them soon. 

I've used the solution for the last two years.

The stability of the solution is good.

The scalability is great.

Technical support is great.

Positive

No, we were not using any backup solution earlier.

The initial setup is very simple.

We had help from the vendor team for the installation process.

Our ROI has been very good.

Vembu is a good value for money solution.

Yes, we evaluated Retrospect.

They need to keep improving the solution so that we can reduce the time taken for backups and restorations.