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Boxafe vs N-able Cove Data Protection comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Boxafe
Ranking in SaaS Backup
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
N-able Cove Data Protection
Ranking in SaaS Backup
8th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (30th), Cloud Backup (17th), MSP Backup (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the SaaS Backup category, the mindshare of Boxafe is 1.3%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of N-able Cove Data Protection is 4.3%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
SaaS Backup
 

Featured Reviews

Srikanth Purushothaman - PeerSpot reviewer
A reliable backup solution that needs to incorporate a flexible pricing model
We use Boxafe for backup.  I like the tool's reliability. Its price is also cheap, and it gets delivered in two days.  Boxafe's pricing policy should be more flexible.  I have been working with the product for seven years.  The product is stable.  I rate Boxafe's scalability an eight out of…
Jack Henson - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows us to back up workstations and servers, and saved us time when checking endpoints and the viability of backups
I have some issues with the agent failing on workstations. I've had to completely uninstall several of them, delete everything, and start over to get them to work. That's been the biggest source of my problems recently. The problem is that when we delete one, we lose the backup. Consequently, it means we're without a backup unless we have a local copy. When we delete the agent, there's the problem of how to go back and restore it. I haven't had to deal with it yet, because I haven't had a failure that occurred while I was doing that. I had a workstation that started failing, and we couldn't get the services to run. I don't know what caused it. I had to reinstall the agent, which didn't work. I had to go into the machine and delete everything and load another agent onto it. Once I did that, I was able to make it work, but 90% of the time I never have an issue. During the other 10% of the time when I have a problem, it's a mess. The ability to recover to a different workstation or a different data point is a little bit clumsy. It could use some work.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I like the tool's reliability. Its price is also cheap, and it gets delivered in two days."
"The most valuable feature was the repository."
"We use a neat feature called VDR status, Virtual Disaster Recovery status. It only works on servers... It's automated. Once or twice a month it will virtually mount the backup and provide a screenshot and advise whether or not there have been any errors."
"It's their cloud, it's their storage. I don't have to buy a space on Amazon or Google's cloud and then use their software to push it. That works well for me. This way, I don't have to worry about another option or the opportunity that there might be a credential leak."
"One of the bigger features and advantages of the solution is that it is easy to integrate with my RMM which is also N-able."
"What I like the most about it's the ease of use and the reliability that it has when copying information to the cloud."
"The solution has reduced backup times by an immeasurable amount. Its backups are incremental, so you are only backing up data changes based on the last 24 hours or so. If you are also maintaining the stored images, the restores are also only incremental, happening in minutes. Whereas, with a lot of the other solutions that we have looked at, each time it goes to refresh the restore, then it has to build a completely new image. That takes forever. This solution also improves recovery time."
"The most valuable feature by far is the Virtual Disaster Recovery. On top of that is the bare-metal recovery. The recovery options that we have are great. We have tested the Virtual Disaster Recovery and the bare-metal recovery in just about any scenario you can think of. We have even restored bare metal, a full server, to a laptop, and had full functionality. It's just insane how well it works and how simple it is. It does most of the work for you."
"The initial setup of N-able Cove Data Protection was very easy."
"The monitoring makes it very easy to check whether a backup has gone bad."
 

Cons

"Boxafe's pricing policy should be more flexible."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing. This is the issue, the reason why we started using Synology."
"An area for improvement that would really work out well would be if there were a little bit more of an elegant handshake relationship between SolarWinds RMM and the PCs that are being backed up, to advise regarding "up" status... Since RMM is an agent that feeds back that a machine is alive and on, I don't see any reason why they can't either tap into that one feature or build the same exact polling within the backup agent, to update right away and say the system is online or offline."
"One area I don't like has to do with the agent that goes on the system... if a system stays offline for some length of time, say for a week or so, I may have to go back in and reinstall the agent to get it back in business. I don't know what's causing that."
"For small amounts of data, recovery is easy, but when it's large amounts of data, it takes forever. So, if they can have a service where they put our data on a hard drive and ship it to us as fast as possible, it would be great. Even if there's a fee associated with it, it's fine."
"N-able Cove Data Protection for Microsoft 365 is an area with shortcomings that need improvement."
"We don't use the solution’s automated recovery testing because SolarWinds made me cross. When they released it, I went, "Oh, well, that's quite good." Because if you use the system, then it supposedly spins up, and on the portal, it gives you a screenshot of the booted device. So, I phoned up, and I said, "Oh, that's really quite cool. How much is that?" They said, "No, no, no. It's all included in your license." I went, "Okay then," and went and deployed it on about half the fleet. One of the options that our customers have is they can pay us a small amount every month for us to test the recovery just to prove that it's viable, and I thought, "Well, this will do that for us. Nice." Then, in the next invoice, we got a charge for it. While It was not a huge amount, I took offense at the fact that we were told that it would be a no extra cost option that was part of our license, but it turns out that it's chargeable. Therefore, we haven't used it since."
"We would like to have better reporting."
"Integration with a hybrid cloud is something that I found complicated."
"The only area that needs improvement is that it is a little bit difficult when you get into virtual machines. The initial deployment of Cove is a little tedious, not for standard machines, but when you get into specialty stuff, like Hyper-V."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's price is cheap. I rate it five out of ten."
"The pricing of SolarWinds seems to be fair compared to the rest of the industry."
"The pricing is very competitive and it's well worth the price."
"The only option I would like to see is an adjustable scale. Right now we have 250 seats and we're not using all of them. It would be nice to be able to save that little bit of money by being able to buy just what we need."
"When you have a device/appliance on the site quite a lot of the other enterprise class backup people insist that you have their appliance, which is frankly offensively expensive. Because when you pry the top off, it's just a standard 19-inch tin box with a standard Intel I5 in it, some RAM, and a hard drive. Then, you go, "Why have they just charged me 5,500 quid for a box, which I could have probably build for under 500." Whereas, with the SolarWinds product, they don't have that. The backup appliances that we have onsite are just plain cooking PCs. We can build our own machines, which is reflected in the price that we can offer a customer."
"I believe that the price is very reasonable in comparison to other options. It is cheaper than both Redstor and Acronis and, since we are now using our own on-premise cloud, there is absolutely no comparison since we have unlimited storage rather than paying per gigabyte used for their onsite storage. We are currently able to backup fifty computers for the same price that we use to backup five computers."
"Cove only takes the data you have on the physical server. I can back that up for long periods of time, and I don't accrue high charges to have the data in the cloud. It stays at one rate. This allows me to forecast payment for the next one or two years and show clients their estimated growth."
"There is no per node cost, at least not the way I am doing it. I am on bulk. New customers can be set up on a trial, where they can get things all squared away, then they can switch over to being a billed customer."
"The price isn't extreme, but I'd love to pay less."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
21%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Boxafe?
I like the tool's reliability. Its price is also cheap, and it gets delivered in two days.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Boxafe?
The tool's price is cheap. I rate it five out of ten.
What needs improvement with Boxafe?
Boxafe's pricing policy should be more flexible.
What do you like most about N-able Backup?
The initial setup of N-able Cove Data Protection was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for N-able Backup?
The pricing is affordable. N-able Cove Data Protection has a direct-to-cloud architecture, but it also allows saving backups locally without extra storage costs.
What needs improvement with N-able Backup?
There aren’t any challenges. Regarding the additional features, Cove is limited to disaster recovery with Azure. It would be great to make disaster recovery compatible with AWS.
 

Also Known As

No data available
N-able Backup, SolarWinds Backup, SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery, SolarWinds MSP Backup
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Computer Depot, Leading Edge Computers, IT Logic Australia
Find out what your peers are saying about Boxafe vs. N-able Cove Data Protection and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
841,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.