N-able Cove Data Protection Reviews

We use MSP Backup & Recovery for just about any backup system, as long as it is running Windows or Windows Server.

We also have a couple of clients that have databases to back up. It does a very good job of automatically picking up an SQL or a MySQL database. If we need to restore just the database to another machine, although we don't have too many use cases for that, we have been able to do it when we tested it.

We use it for virtual machine backup and recovery as well. It does a great job of that. So even if a client has a host system and, say, one VM running on it for a special purpose, but they don't have the budget to pay for two backups for some reason, it does a great job of backing up the virtual machine itself, and it can be restored independently. 

A nice part about the SolarWinds backup and recovery solution is that I get to pick how it's deployed, and it's per-client. They really give you a lot of options with that. They pretty much have any feature that I, as an MSP, could want, and they let me choose how to provide their product to the client. I could cut out features if I wanted, which I don't, or I could add features as tiers to make a pricing bracket for myself to sell to them. I have one client that has a full, second dedicated server. It runs the virtual disaster recovery console, so it's constantly getting all the new backup images every day. If the first system goes down, the second system is able to bring it right back up.

I have other clients that just don't have that kind of budget. They simply need one workstation, not even a server, backed up. And they want me to be able to get either the files or the full image down from the cloud to put on a new machine. If the first one fails, they don't have the budget to have a disaster-ready plan where, if everything goes down, they have something running that takes it right back up. They have a spare computer onsite we would move things to. SolarWinds gives me the options to do both things very cleanly and to please those different levels of clients, without having to jump through too many hoops.

It does everything I want. I feel a lot better with it because I've already used it in the recovery scenarios and know it works and I've got guys testing things on a regular basis. The clients are happy because they know that I'm happy with the solution, because I'm usually going to suggest it over something else. It just makes everything so much easier on the backup. There used to be so much anxiety with other solutions because they were so much harder to manage.

This gives me a dashboard with a bunch of green, yellow, or red lights based on how things are going. I can put technicians into action based on things failing or not updating properly. And the few times we have had things go wrong, it has been easy to communicate with the client quickly and make them feel that we're very on top of it and aware of this process, just because of how the system is set up to work.

In general, we used to have to have that "backup conversation" with a client, every once in a while, to see how things were going. Now, because this is our baseline of how we expect things to work in a perfect world, even if they don't have this, it's made our backup documentation process easier. We tell the customer, "Hey, this is how it would work in a perfect world, but this is how your system works. If you want to get closer to where it could be, here are some things we can do." It has made it easier to talk to the clients about the options that they have.

Before, I didn't have a whole lot of confidence in the solutions we had, compared to the confidence I have in this. That lack of confidence in the products we were using made it harder for me to even have that conversation with the client. SolarWinds has just completely flipped that around, and that's true for other people inside our org as well. Other people were having the same grievances I was. It was hard to find a good backup solution where it didn't feel like we, as the MSP, were getting shafted in some way and we were having to charge the client a lot more because of that. It was especially true when you get into how a lot of vendors price their cloud backups compared to SolarWinds. It's absolutely crazy when you look at the cost comparison. So having that extra confidence and being happy with the solution has really changed the entire game and that's because of how it is priced and how they let us present the product itself.

The cost for the customer has gone down because we don't have them buying as much. We don't run a second recovery computer at many locations, unless the system is vital to every operation, because we have the Local SpeedVault that we use. It's either an onsite NAF or an external hard drive that stores all the stuff locally for the machine it would need to restore to. It gives us a really good, fast solution, compared to pulling it down from the cloud and messing with their bandwidth, especially if they have VoIP phones. The cost of investment has gone down. For a few niche customers that are much larger, the cost has gone up, but the return on investment, as far as data security goes, is much bigger. Previously, if I would have had them invest that much in another product, I wouldn't have felt good about it. But asking a larger client to put in a second server, so I can always push their stuff out right away if there is a failure, is a pretty big deal. By comparison, with Carbonite I actually had that set up, but when I tried to use the tool not only could I not get help using it properly, I never got the thing to work. With SolarWinds it was so simple, it felt almost too easy.

In addition, there is much less of a time investment from my techs, compared to before. That's the nicest thing it has changed in our everyday operation.

And for me, it has drastically reduced the amount of time spent on backup administration. We had people spread out on different odds and ends for different customers, for whatever solutions the customer wanted. We didn't have one solution. Between keeping things documented as well as I could, as a one-man show on that end, and actually being able to test stuff, if I could test stuff, and always trying to figure out the products, I'm probably saving a good 10 hours a month, if not a lot more just on that. If I had kept the solution we had before and grown to the number of customers I have now, I don't doubt it would have required another whole employee to manage things, with the amount of backup and the different solutions that we had to use. This one ended up bringing together any use cases somebody has, because most of our customers are running in a Windows environment. It fits their needs perfectly.

As for backup time on the computer and how long it takes to run, it's insane how much quicker it is compared to constantly having to check back and forth between what's going on on the computer and what I see in the cloud. Carbonite had poor solutions for looking at what was actively happening. With SolarWinds, after I install it on the computer, I never have to log in to the computer again, if I'm working at a higher level where I'm not interacting with customers. I can always pull up these backup systems remotely from the cloud. I pull up the system, it pulls up a webpage, and it gives me the percentage it's processing and how much data that actually is.

And if my local is synchronized with the cloud, I get to look at all this data in one place, compared to going back and forth between a local computer and maybe a website and one other thing. It's all in one spot. I can manage every computer from an easy console. It has probably saved 55 percent, if not more, of actual employee time. It's not something I've actually calculated, but I am the person who was spending that time before, and that's when we were supporting way fewer clients. We've grown this product with us as we've added people to it. I don't think we have many customers with an important local system that we haven't gotten to move to SolarWinds, unless they've outright refused to back up what they have.

The backups themselves seem to run much quicker, even though they're going to the cloud. It has two different phases. The time it takes to process the backup on the computer is quicker, especially if I've got my Local SpeedVault there, or my secondary system that is acting as a speed vault to bring it back up quickly if the system fails. Having either of those there, it gets done within minutes, most of the time. There have been very few times where I've seen it go above 30 minutes, and that's on a bigger system and when they had a lot of stuff going on that day. On my old system, I'd be watching this program take time to launch, run the backup job usually it would make the shadow copies first. This seems to do all that stuff so much quicker.

On the other end, it uploads to the cloud. If I did have a manual upload to the cloud before, or was using something like Carbonite, this seems to get to the cloud quicker than those. And if it's going to a local hard drive or a local secondary system that is a failover, it's stupid-quick. It's the difference between looking away for a little bit at another task while it runs, and it's done, compared to keeping another computer up or another page up with a loading bar for a bit, while I'm constantly going back to it and waiting for it to finish. That's the difference it's made in my every-day.

When it comes to recovery times, I'll give you two different scenarios. In the small scenarios, where just files or folders have been lost or deleted and we need to find them and restore them from within the last 30 days, it's gone from 10 minutes down to closer to seven or five minutes, because we know exactly where to go. Every one of our techs who is trained on this can get there super-easy. They're not having to memorize three systems.

The other end is the big scenarios. I've had an entire server go down or a natural disaster that has stopped the business from functioning, and I needed to get them up and running one way or another on a completely separate computer. I was only relying on my cloud data to do this. In those scenarios, it has reduced our recovery time by a minimum of 12 hours.

The difference is quite crazy. Before, even if I could get stuff down to another server, I had to install the server OS and get stuff running. I had nothing else that did a good virtual disaster recovery in the big cases. Virtual disaster recovery is so big because for any system, no matter how complicated it is, I can already have a server running that has Hyper-V installed, and I can get this thing up and running with Hyper-V within a matter of hours. Sometimes, it's less than an hour, depending on how quick my download is. Really, at that point, I'm limited to: Do I have local data I can source from as far as the backups go, or am I only going from the cloud? If it's only the cloud, my biggest limit is my bandwidth. Going full-blast at our shop, if we let that server do that, we can get somebody up and running in less than an hour, even if they have something like a 200-gigabyte setup. On a larger server with multiple terabytes, it does take longer. There's no way around that, unless they have that secondary system set up onsite. But for the people that do have that, I manually log in and start that secondary server up. I literally click a button and configure one or two things and I'm good to go. It's insane compared to before. I did not have a solution that came even close to that, a couple of years ago.

My primary use case is for servers, user workstations, and Office 365 data. For the servers, I was looking for a solution that would allow me to do disaster recovery testing without a huge overhead in cost. This was the only solution I could find that worked really well and allowed me to use my own appliances to do disaster recovery testing. It also allows me to have an appliance either in my office or at the client site to actively restore the actual appliance.

I do multiple disaster recovery tests every quarter, and we do recovery tests on workstations every couple of weeks just to confirm the data is accessible. For all the workstations we manage, we try to add the backup solution to each computer. They have a file-based backup for important files, which is a really cheap alternative, and then they have a full image-based backup, SQL backup, Exchange backup, and full server backups. 

Primarily, we use it in small businesses that either have a server, use Office 365, or both. We use it pretty heavily. We're an MSP that utilizes this solution, and we also resell it to another vendor that does more of a break/fix style. They're not really an MSP, but I resell it to them as well. The rest of them are through packages from my clients.

The amount of time it takes for us to monitor and check the backup has decreased greatly. We're down to about 20 minutes of checks each day. We used to spend an average of three hours testing and troubleshooting problems, but now it's very rare that we actually run into problems.

We only have to go into one console, which is another huge benefit because my techs don't have to bounce around.

The other benefit is being able to provide a workstation backup for clients. Previously, it would get really expensive. A lot of the clients wouldn't even want to go with them. The big improvement is that we've been able to recover data for clients that aren't supposed to save locally, but they have. We're able to pull it back, and we look like the hero compared to in the past when we couldn't afford to put it on all the machines. Clients would get frustrated that they paid for backup on their server but didn't understand why they couldn't get the files they saved locally. We're now confident that we can protect all our data and devices at an extremely reasonable cost.

With Cove, I know that all their data is protected. I can set many different settings on different archiving levels, so I can have different compliancy in there. It saved us a lot because the cost is so effective that we can push it to all of our clients. We don't have to worry that we're going to ruin one of our relationships because a lot of people just don't understand how backup works and that it's not on everything. This really protected us and improved our relationships because we've recovered a lot of data for people. Whereas in the past, we wouldn't have had a backup on it.

Disaster recovery is another benefit because it's so reliable. We're able to constantly test and run disaster recovery testing on some servers. We do it to our location nightly. With that option, we've been able to deploy servers when one of our clients has failed and had them up and running within a few hours. Previously, we could never get a solid solution, so we typically had to just download the data and start from scratch, which always took us a few days. 

Our clients are really impressed and thankful that they're able to get their data back or their server up and running so much faster than before. It previously cost us a lot of money because it took a lot of time. There was also a lot of frustration on the client's side because being down for a couple of days is not good for me or them.

The ability to back up, restore, and do different types of testing for preventative maintenance really increased our importance to these clients because they see the value in how fast we can get them back up and running. We're saving them money in that way.

It is backing up customers' servers. On the machine that they wish to protect, they deploy an agent on it.

It is essential for all businesses to back up their IT systems. In our view, it has to be automatic, offsite, and require no user intervention at the client level. The SolarWinds product provides all of those things.

The solution supports full-system, bare-metal, file, and folder. One of the reasons that we like the system is that it maintains up-to-date standby virtual machines, which can be booted at short notice if the customer's primary device fails. So, the predominant recovery methodology that we have is backing up to hypervisor as a VM. We have used the bare-metal recovery in the past and that has its use, but all the ones that we have put onto our customers in a commercial sense are all recovering to hypervisors.

Without cloud storage, we wouldn't do it. If it didn't have offsite storage, we would not be using it as a backup solution.

Because we have confidence in the backup, we feel more free to experiment with our customer systems. For instance, if we have a server, and we've sat there scratching our heads because we really need to make this big change on the server, but if it goes wrong, then the customer will be screaming at us for a month. We can now go, "Oh, it doesn't really matter. Just do it. If it all goes horribly wrong, then 30 minutes later, I'll have pulled the backup from last night. It will all be good. 

Because we can keep images of our clients' machines on our test machines in our workshop, I can go, "You know what? I'll spin up their copy from last night, make the changes I want to make, and if it all goes bang, then I'll just delete it." Then, tonight, they'll put a fresh copy on it. So, it's freed us up from the worry of working on live machines. 

From the customer's point of view, if it all goes tip top tomorrow due to things like ransomware, they have a backup from Friday. So, who cares?

I have used the solution for complicated recovery scenarios, such as a complex database recovery, to the point where SolarWinds is now using some of the techniques that we have developed in our office as part of their mainstream products. I find it extremely easy to manage the solution in such scenarios, but then I have immersed myself in the product for five years. If you are experienced at building and using virtual machines to get backups, e.g., if you can drive VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V, then I would guess the recovery process is almost trivial. You literally download the software, type in the access codes for the date set that you want, and press "Recover". It is pretty much that simple.

The recovery speed from the cloud depends on how big your data set is, how fast your broadband connection is, and how spry the Internet is feeling that day. Here are a couple of examples: 

1. We have a remote system in our stockroom downstairs where we can do test builds. If I tell it to build a server that it hasn't built before, it has to pull the data out of the cloud, and and it is sort of a standard size server, then you are looking at about four hours of time. However, we have good broadband, and it's being built onto a pretty potent system.
2. In the normal course of events onsite, as well as having a cloud image, it also keeps an image copy on a local data store. In which case, I can pull up a server back for a client in about 15 minutes. This is something that I did the other day.

We're an MSP, so we have many different clients. We use Cove software for backing up workstations and servers.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud.

My customers are all offsite. I use the solution from a management console standpoint from my current business location, which is usually my home or my laptop if I'm traveling.

My customers are small organizations. Most of them have fewer than 100 employees. Very few of them qualify as medium organizations.

This solution made my time more effective. I don't spend as much time checking the viability of backups compared to other solutions. The solution saved us 30-40 minutes per day.

We haven't had customers calling about network slowdowns or experienced traffic from running a backup during business hours. The manageability of the product has been very helpful.

There's a turnaround time with a solution like this. It takes time to get familiar with it and install it. It took about a month to realize these benefits.

The single pane of glass gives me reporting and control over all of the agents with just one operation. This streamlining gave me more time for other tasks.

This solution allows us to save 10% of storage. It doesn't save us a huge amount of storage costs because the cost of storage is now reduced. It saves between $40-50 per month.

We sell services to other companies, and we also use Cove Data Protection in-house. We use it to back up servers and document files on workstations. It's mainly for servers and some workstations that are very busy, and we back up the documents folder.

We represent other companies. We provide IT services, so we sell services to other companies. The response from the other companies that we do the backups for is that they're very satisfied. It's complete satisfaction all the way around. There's not much we can complain about.

Cove Data Protection's cloud-first architecture gets the backups off of local networks and out of the reach of ransomware, which is very important because as we all know, we are all susceptible to ransomware attacks. Even though we have all the protection in place, such as firewalls, endpoint protection, and whatever else we can possibly think of, there's always the risk. If we get attacked locally, either on the workstation or server, we know that the cloud information should be intact so that we can bring it back any time we want. I say "should" because you never know.

It has grossly reduced the time or resources needed for administration. Previously, we were backing up more on local devices and into different data centers that we have or data centers of different clients. We were all using local devices to back up to little hard drives or tape drives, but it all required a lot of user intervention and a lot of people complained. Nobody wanted to do that anymore. Cove Data Protection has reduced a lot of time because nobody has to touch anything anymore. You just look at your email, and if the green light is on, it's fine. It's backed up. However, I wouldn't be able to tell if the freed resources were able to take on strategic projects or not. In most cases, they probably did have some other project going on because we do deal with a lot of different companies, but I don't know exactly how they distribute their resources. I would assume that they did. Less time is spent on the backups, and obviously, they can do other things with their time.

We are an MSP. Cove Data Protection has streamlined the way we handle data protection across all device types and customers. It gives us the ability to handle a much larger workload than we could have handled previously because it requires less intervention on our part or anybody's part. So, we have more of our internal resources available for our other clients or to bring on new clients, whereas, in the past, we couldn't do too much of that because the backups were handled internally and required too much user intervention, and of course, we would get a million calls, "How do you do this? How do I do that?" and so on and so forth. It has improved where that was the case.

This streamlining of data protection has affected the service levels that we are able to offer to our customers in a positive way. It gives us the ability to offer more services from the comfort of our office. People don't have to run after you and don't have to go looking for you. You're always at the same place, so it's very simple, very easy, and you can answer questions quicker. You can do your services quicker, and it's an all-around satisfaction.

Cove Data Protection uses less storage for a given number of restore points compared to traditional image backup products. It uses less. Their compression ratio is quite high, so the end result is that it seems to take a lot less space than the traditional backups we were using before. It has saved at least 20% of space.

The biggest saving is in the large data. We start to see the biggest savings with clients who have over 1 TB of data because internal backups or tape backups require a lot more resources than cloud backups. It depends on the amount of data you're trying to back up, but if somebody is backing up 500 GB of data or 200 GB of data, it's not much of a difference. When you start getting closer to a terabyte, that's when you start to see big savings.

There are a lot of backup solutions out there, including cloud backup solutions. We wanted one that was reliable, had a good name, and obviously was easy to deploy, manage and monitor. We checked all of those boxes with the Cove.

The one thing that really drew us to it, is the ability to launch any failed backups remotely without having to remote into the person's computer or server. We can do all of that through the console and just kick off backups that may have failed for one reason or another.

We've got twenty-seven different clients right now using Cove and our success rate on backups, taking out all the variables like computers being offline or crashing, is about a 95% to 99% success rate at all times. 

It's a very reliable product. Dovetailing with that, being able to tell our clients that their backups are working every day ensures that they don't have to worry about monitoring them anymore or letting us monitor them. We are no longer constantly letting them know, "Hey, your backups failed again and again, and again." It builds our reputation.

We use it to do complete server backups, including system state, for disaster recovery. We also have a few workstations that we back up as well.

We are trying to promote everything being backed up on the platform: Out of sight, out of mind, just back up everything. We've created a new pricing model to help that along and hopefully clients will see the value in having that.

The single pane of glass saves a ton of time. We can sort by data resources and scroll down and see which servers have SQL, which servers have enabled the system state, which are only file and folders backups, and we see the Microsoft 365 SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Exchange, and OneDrive backups. If you set it up this way, it has color bars and each of the color bars represents 28 or 30 days or 31 days. When you hover over each day you can see the date. If it's a solid green or a light green that means it's great. If it's orange that means it failed once or twice or three times for whatever reason; whether you rebooted the server or whether there was a power loss and the server was off. You can figure out what the problem was really quickly.

If it's a server that's been on for a long time and that has always reported in, and the backup fails, it's literally as simple as remoting in, stopping the backup service controller, stopping cryptographic services, restarting that service, restarting the backup service controller and letting it back up off to the next pass. A few hours later, you look back and you say, "Everything's working again." It works like a charm. It really is a completely hands-off, set-it-and-forget-it system, with great alerting. 

I spend about five minutes in the portal, and even that is an exaggeration, just to make sure everything is good in the morning. I'll pop in at some point in the afternoon, and I'll pop in during the evening just make sure everything is good, because sometimes I don't check my email. I'll just go into the dashboard and see that single pane of glass and know that everything's working. I don't really think about backups. It's a tremendous time-saver. It's truly easy to use. There's a single pane of glass. You tweak it a little bit, create your filters, and then you look at it a few times a day. If I spend five minutes a day on it, that's a lot.