Quest Rapid Recovery Reviews

I use Quest Rapid Recovery as a comprehensive solution for data backup, replication, and recovery across various IT environments.

Quest Rapid Recovery has improved our organization by making backups faster. In the past, using tape backups would take two to four days, but with Rapid Recovery, it is now completed within 24 hours, excluding the additional four-hour buffer.

The most valuable feature of Quest Rapid Recovery for our organization is the VM recovery functionality. Being able to take a snapshot and restore to another hardware or VM with just a five-minute downtime is crucial for us. Given the scale of our organization with thousands of VMs, this rapid VM recovery capability becomes a vital aspect of our workflow.

One area where Quest Rapid Recovery has room for improvement is in the handling of snapshots on Hyper-V. After the retention period, the snapshots on Hyper-V are automatically deleted, even though the integration is initially available. This creates a challenge for us, as we would like the snapshots to remain accessible on Hyper-V. In the next release of Quest Rapid Recovery, I would like to see enhanced traffic security features. Specifically, the ability to integrate with Active Directory would be valuable.

I have been working with Quest Rapid Recovery for five years.

The product is quite stable.

I would rate the scalability of the product as a nine out of ten. In my company, approximately 1,000 VMs and around 50 physical clients are currently using Quest Rapid Recovery. In terms of overall usage, the solution is active 24/7 to ensure continuous data protection and recovery capabilities for our systems. We plan to expand its usage.

Quest's technical support is usually good, but I currently have a case related to Rapid Recovery that has been ongoing for 10 to 15 days without a resolution. I would rate the support as a seven out of ten

Neutral

I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as an eight out of ten. 
During our initial setup of Quest Rapid Recovery, we encountered some smaller issues, mainly related to version compatibility and system changes. Setting up Quest Rapid Recovery was quick and done within a day. We started by ensuring the required prerequisites were in place. One server was dedicated to Rapid Recovery, and another acted as a proxy for communication. After installing the Rapid Recovery client on both servers and establishing communication, we configured settings and set up a backup schedule, deciding on file-level or full backups as needed. The process was straightforward, making the deployment efficient and completed within a day. One person with the right skills is all it takes for the deployment.

My advice to people who are considering implementing Rapid Recovery is that if you are using hypervisors, I strongly recommend it for backup. It is the best choice for effective data protection. Overall, I would rate the solution as a nine out of ten.

We use Quest Rapid Recovery for disaster recovery of certain servers. This tool helps us restore live data. It also helps us with processes that can be from either a backup appliance or a backup disk.

It has helped our organization. In some cases, we feel that some data is missing from the disk. In such scenarios, we restore the HomeDesk with a set of time demands that are determined according to the application that you want to either restore or work with. You do not need to wait and can continue working.

The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery process from the data center.

I have not found any areas of improvement for the solution. In case, if there is anything, it would be the speed of the operation to be finished. Even then, I can easily work on the storing function before the operation is finished. However, there is a store operation almost any time but it can work either way so I find no problem there.

I have been working with this solution since 2017 and am still using it.

The solution is stable and solid.

The solution is scalable. It depends on the appliance backup disk. I use the DD 6300. Only two users from the admin side are using the tool.

We have previously used Veritas NetBackup and Quest NetVault.

The initial setup is not really easy. You don’t know about the software. You need to set up the software on the server. Then server-wise, you will define the repository desk where you are making the backups. After that, you need to define the client or the server client from which you need to take the backup from. Once complete, you can store it anytime.

You can use this to conduct a backup every week, every day, or every hour, and if there is any problem we can restore the fix on the server at any time according to the time lost.

The deployment did not take much time and can be completed almost in one hour.

We did the deployment through a department with the vendor. The partner was working on the deployment. We did not require lots of resources or staff members for the deployment.

I am not sure about the cost aspects since it comes with other software as a bundle.

I would rate this solution as a ten on ten. I recommend Quest Rapid Recovery as a must-have tool for rapid recovery. It is a safe solution to restore the backup operation. The maintenance of the solution is not difficult. You can say that ‘there is no need to troubleshoot’. 

The main pro of Quest Rapid Recovery is that you can do the restoration process anytime, store the data that lies on the disk, and work directly on the server. You will need to wait till the store process is completed. The con of the solution is that you need a big amount of disks to take the whole backup of your environment.

In terms of my use case for Quest Rapid Recovery, for one customer, I'm doing a case study, so there's a backup requirement for sixteen to twenty VMs and some physical machines, and there's a need to replicate that backup to the DR site. My company then uses Quest Rapid Recovery for backing up the VMs and replicating them on the websites, so whenever and wherever that is required, the VMs can be restored on the DR site.

One feature I found that's the most valuable in Quest Rapid Recovery is the VM standby feature which is very useful for my current customer. The solution also has a great replication feature. The third most valuable feature in Quest Rapid Recovery is the five-minute RPO and the fifteen-minute RTO. The solution is also very user-friendly.

In terms of what needs improvement in Quest Rapid Recovery, though the solution is seamless, right now, they are just giving the software which means we'll need to arrange the hardware. If they can combine the appliance and software, that would be a great approach.

In the next release of Quest Rapid Recovery, it would be great if they'd add a folder backup feature because only a snapshot backup feature is available at the moment.

I've been working with Quest Rapid Recovery for the last six or seven years.

Quest Rapid Recovery is a stable solution. It is very reliable.

Quest Rapid Recovery is a scalable solution, but it's not as scalable as NetVault.

The technical support for Quest Rapid Recovery is quite good. You just need to raise a ticket then within two hours, the support team will have a remote session with you and resolve your issues. On a scale of one to five, I would rate support a four.

The initial setup for Quest Rapid Recovery was straightforward. Deployment only takes thirty minutes if you do an OS patch, otherwise, it'll only take fifteen to twenty minutes maximum.

On a scale of one to five, with one being very complex and five being very easy, I'd give the initial setup of Quest Rapid Recovery a score of five.

We implement Quest Rapid Recovery for our customers in-house.

I'm not aware of the exact cost of Quest Rapid Recovery because I'm from the technical team, but in general, the solution is quite competitive cost-wise.

We evaluated Veeam and Nutanix against Quest Rapid Recovery. In terms of RPO, Quest Rapid Recovery has a five-minute RPO and that's a good point, while Veeam takes longer: fifteen minutes. Quest Rapid Recovery has VM standby as a native feature, while Veeam has replication on VMware. If you have VMware on both the DC and DR sides, you can replicate VMs from the Veeam console.

As for Nutanix, it has the native inbuilt plugin for Veeam that isn't present in Quest Rapid Recovery, but is in another Quest product: NetVault.

My company is a reseller and system integrator that sells backup solutions to customers, for example, Quest Rapid Recovery.

My company works on different releases of the solution, old and new, depending on the customer environment.

Quest Rapid Recovery doesn't require any maintenance unless there's a new patch release.

I would recommend Quest Rapid Recovery, but my recommendation would be on a case-by-case basis. The solution is most suitable for SMB customers, but it won't be suitable for all enterprise clients because it is not suitable for online databases such as SQL and Postgre, particularly because Quest Rapid Recovery has a snapshot-based backup. For databases, the vendor has a different solution called NetVault. If the client needs a physical machine backup, Quest Rapid Recovery is suitable, but if the client is using SQL or SAP HANA, then NetVault is the best tool.

What I'd recommend if you're looking into implementing Quest Rapid Recovery is to look at the feature list first and compare that against what you want and what's available in the solution.

My rating for Quest Rapid Recovery is nine out of ten.

We back up our on-premise servers, storing and archiving in the cloud and on-premise.

It is on a physical server.

When we had a server upgrade, we were able to restore the entire disk to another machine. It was very easy to do. This was a huge benefit. We were able to just take the data off of the Rapid Recovery backup and restore it to the new machine. We didn't really have any downtime other than the obvious meantime to restore, which was pretty slow only because the setup of the environment wasn't best practice. So, the data was stored on a USB drive that was not the standard configuration for Rapid Recovery. Therefore, it took 15 to 18 hours to get it restored, but we were able to do that on a weekend. We upgraded Rapid Recovery to the local disk instead of USB, which made it tremendously better.

The ease of use has reduced the admin time involved in our backup/recovery operations. Once the system was set up correctly, it ran smoothly. It is a set it and forget it kind of thing. 

Though I haven't noticed a huge impact, Synthetic incremental backups have helped to reduce the impact to our production environment and network resources.

Disk backup (archiving to the cloud) is its most valuable feature because it provides for our disaster recovery plan.

The incremental backups take far less space. The less you have to store and the more compressed it is, the less disk you will need.

It gives me great peace of mind.

The archive feature is a little cryptic. I don't think that it is very understandable. Also, the difference between transfer versus backup versus archive and all the terminology can be a little bit muddy. Maybe some white papers or something describing what each thing is, because I had to learn it by calling technicians. Thank goodness, I had a maintenance agreement with software support. For example, I was looking for something called backup and it was called transfer. So, the terminology wasn't things I was used to. 

I was trying to look through an archive, and I couldn't see where you mount the archive. I couldn't find it anywhere. Sometimes, once you know where things are and learn the system, then it is fairly simple, but it is understanding their terminology and what each thing means and how each part is used that maybe could be improved.

The terminology didn't seem easily available. When I go to the website, it is hard to search for things. You get all the articles, then you finally get the search button. They need the search at the top of the knowledge base. Then, on occasion, if you get an error message in the system, which is very important, it says, "Click here for more information," but I never get more information. The search engine doesn't find it or it is some weird error. It has never worked for me.

I have been using it for almost three years.

It is very stable because we haven't had any issues with it. There have been issues related to disk, or something like that. However, as far as the software/product failing, we haven't experienced any of that.

I am the administrator for all things IT.

Everything is pretty stable, so we are not increasing usage.

This is not really applicable because my organizations are very small.

The technical support is excellent. They have been responsive and have always resolved the issue. They are easy to understand and know the products.

The technicians said it was a good idea to enable Synthetic once that feature was available through the updates. So, the technician recommended Synthetic be turned on.

It was previously the same product, but Dell EMC owned it. So, it was Dell AppAssure, then Quest took it over and it became Rapid Recovery. 

I have used the Symantec Backup Exec Enterprise and Carbonite. Carbonite didn't have as many features and Symantec was just impossible to get technical support on. I think Rapid Recovery falls into the middle, where they're easy to get ahold of, but not too large, and the product is robust enough.

I didn't set up the system originally. When I came in, they were already using the system so I didn't know that it was an inappropriate configuration. Once I was able to talk to technicians, they described what the best practices were so we modified the machines with the local disk instead of USB, then it was much better.

Even though we did this deployment over a weekend, we were able to get everything done over a weekend so it didn't impact the usual Monday through Friday work week. It was very important that there were no big impacts nor distractions to the work environment because it is just disruptive to users' work. In this situation, all the users' case files and data were on that drive, so it had to be restored. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been able to work. This is why zero to very little downtime is important, because it just completely disrupts the business.

It does require a little bit of upfront time to get everything configured via best practices. Once it is set up, it is fairly reliable as long as your Internet connection and network stay stable.

If you are going to start with Rapid Recovery as a new system, I would advise investing in the consulting time to get the system set up properly. It is very important to work with an engineer. Once it has been set up properly, they sort of train you on what you are looking at, then you can take over on it. I don't think that any person should start trying to set up their systems without knowing anything about it. Therefore, the consulting time is very important.

Just knowing that the data is easily recoverable is our ROI. It definitely lowers risk.

Because it is a very small environment, we really haven't reduced costs. However, if it is more efficient, then I won't have to add disk space. So, it could prevent future expenditures on disk space if it can keep it highly compressed.

It is a little expensive. However, I haven't compared it to other solutions. Being a nonprofit, it is always good to have nonprofit discounts on products.

Compared to similar solutions, it is pretty easy to use.

It requires some training. Once you know where the features are, it is very easy to navigate. Their terminology is a little different than most. It seems to be a little different than other concepts of backup or disaster recovery. However, once I was shown some of the basics by a technician, then it was pretty easy to navigate.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

This solution is our on-premises backup server.

It is connected through a VPN to the Azure Rapid recovery backup, off-site virtual server.

We also use it for disaster recovery. If we were to lose the site or the place were to burn down, we could start up a couple of virtual machines on the Azure platform and have users log in via a terminal server through Azure. From there, they could access the MIS system, file server, and other resources until we were able to establish a rebuild of our infrastructure on the school premises.

The major benefit to our organization is the security of the data that we have. We were assured and reassured that we could recover this vital data if there was a critical failure, whether it be on a hardware server, or on a virtual machine. This became apparent over the last six years, where we've had one or two failures on the SQL Server. We've been able to get it up and running with the help of Quest support within a couple of hours.

We use the off-site model, where we replicate all of the current data at the end of the day. After we do our roll-up and everything, we replicate across to the Azure Rapid Recovery Server. At any given time, both servers would be in sync in the evening, with all of the data. Whatever we've got on-premises is the same as what we've got off-site.

File restoration and also virtual server restoration are paramount and critical to the school. I think that over the past six years, I've had probably two occasions where I had to restore a SQL Server.

It is pretty simple to set up and use.

The ease of use has reduced the administration time involved in our backup and recovery operations. I can sleep easily at night knowing that I've got one of the best solutions in place for the school. How a product is used will differ from one client or customer to another and there's a free choice of backup solutions out there, but some of them can be very complex. 

That is something that you don't want to have because, with very complex solutions, you have complex issues happening. With simplistic solutions, they're much easier to run and you don't have to be highly trained to work on them. Conversely, there are some products that you would have to think twice about. Whereas with Quest, after a couple of weeks if you've been working with it all the time, you become good with it. We have reduced our backup and recovery time by between 80% and 90%.

Built-in encryption helps to secure our data as it travels from our on-site server to our off-site backup server.

When you do a full backup, all of the memory resources on the server are used, which is something that should be improved. It is an annoyance because I rotate my disks out for full backups, and I do a nightly backup of the incremental ones that have taken place over the day. When I try to complete a full backup, the process normally uses all my memory resources on the server. This is the oldest issue that they've had, which they just haven't resolved yet.

I have been using Quest Rapid Recovery for more than five years.

This product is very stable. I can't recall having an issue but in cases where people do, they have an app built-in to the software to assist with the troubleshooting. It will diagnose everything and then use FTP to send data to their site, where their support staff will pick it up on a server's request number, which is linked to the upload.

From there, they can diagnose it further and see what the problem is. They will in turn work out a solution and fix the problem, which to me, is important with respect to maintaining stability.

I have had a few things go wrong, now and again, but this year, I haven't had any major problems. The problem that I had last year was that I lost the SQL Server, but Quest sorted it out right away.

If you're a big company then the scalability is quite good. In fact, it is probably one of the best. It depends on how much money you've got to spend. That would be the first thing, especially with the hardware and the data centers.

You could have a third site, which would be a further repository for backups. As it is now, I've got a local site, and storage space on Azure, but if I had another local site where I could use the same repository then it would provide greater redundancy. Instead of having the third site locally, at the same location, it would be somewhere else.

What we've got now is probably the best model for the school. I think a lot of small businesses would probably have the same sort of model that I've got, which is an on-premise server and an off-site server. Depending on their solution, they might have an off-site solution in another location, maybe a few kilometers away from where they are or they might have chosen to use Amazon, or Google, or Azure as the other site to replicate the data to.

Ultimately, I think you have to work out the perfect model for your business, but also, you've got to also think about the costs involved, and you've also got to think about whether it is worth having three sites or just two sites.

This choice depends in part on how important the data is. Normally, the data is very important because that's the most crucial thing for any business. The loss of their data is catastrophic, so to speak. What I've got is on-premises data, with replication that takes place on the Azure site. Plus, on top of that, I've got a nightly backup of the data. I think I've covered every area that I could for the school, and also, the local backup disks that I use are kept in a fire safe. In the unfortunate event that you lost everything, you've still got the backup disk to use for a rebuild, just in case you needed to do one.

I think the problem is that you've got to work out different scenarios. The first scenario would be that you lose the building. What do you do? In this case, you've got your off-site backup, Azure. It will probably take one or two days to get the necessary servers up and running, as virtual machines built on the Azure platform. Then, you've got to get the users. They can be anywhere in the world, remote in through the terminal server, and then they can access the file server or the SQL server or whatever services are available.

Every situation for every business is unique. It depends on what applications you've got and what servers you've got. We are a school but another business might be a pharmaceutical company or it could be an airline. Whatever the business, every company has got to have some solution in place for disaster recovery. That was the model that I decided to follow, and Quest plays an important role in that.

On occasions where I have had to restore a server, the support I had from Quest was fantastic. One time, it was a weekend, and I phoned them up in the early hours of the morning. They got a hold of me within half an hour and we got the SQL Server up and running in a couple of hours.

If you do have any issues, they're regularly available to help you through the process of resolving your problems on a daily basis, or even during the evening or after-hours.

That's the kind of support that you get from Quest.

Before this, we only had one server, and then we expanded the infrastructure. This was the first solution that I chose to use. I looked at Backup Exec also, and I just thought, "No."

I've used Backup Exec in the past, and I wasn't too happy with them. I just thought, "Well, there's Quest. Quest used to be with Dell, and now they've left Dell, so they can build up their products".

They can pursue products that they would like to build, including new ones. They are no longer restricted to developing specific ones. This has allowed them to come up with new ideas for their existing products and their customers, and maybe ask their customers what they'd like to see, in cases where they want changes. This allows for enhancements, for example.

Overall, I think that their products are fantastic but the best one for me is the Rapid Recovery backup solution.

In the end, I haven't seen a change from them leaving Dell to working as a separate company. I think that they're probably as good as they were at Dell, but maybe even better. I don't think that it affected them in a negative way.

It's quite easy to deploy the agents and everything on the virtual and hardware servers. You just have to remember a few pointers. One thing that you have to do, if you're performing an upgrade on the cores, is to make sure that you upgrade the off-site repository first. After that, you move to your on-premise server, where you do the update of the core there. You have to work from back to front, starting with the off-site server. Other than that, it is pretty simple.

The deployment did not take very long to complete. Most of the time can be spent if you have an issue with the virtual machine, and you want to get rid of all of its snapshots, then delete it from the vault. That will take a long time to replicate a base image of, for example, a SQL Server. That takes a couple of days, but it's down to the VPN as well, because of the bandwidth consumption. This is an issue that I have become accustomed to and I don't have too many problems with that side of things. You get what you pay for.

The installation and initial setup on the server were completed by Quest.

It's proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's worth its weight in gold from a software point of view.

Part of the cost of this solution is cloud storage. Azure is quite expensive, but I think that would be the case on any platform, such as Google. I think they probably cost the same per terabyte because it is billed according to how much compute time you use on their platform.

I don't think the licensing for the product is very expensive. That said, to be honest, I don't think you should put money down to how important it is to keep your data secure. There shouldn't be a cost involved in the decision because if you start thinking about costs, it might be to the detriment of your business. I think that you pay for what you get, and if you want to keep your data secure, you need to first think that money shouldn't be an object when it comes to the security of your data.

It was very important that duplication, replication, and virtual standby were available without having to pay extra for these features. Deduplication is critical because it reduces the size of the repository and if you didn't have that, your repository would continue to grow and the cost outlay for storage would be more expensive. You would probably use double or triple the amount of storage that you would like to have if you didn't have deduplication and compression on the data.

There were other products that I did look at, but I thought Quest was probably the best by far. For instance, there was Veeam and VMware that I considered. I just thought that the Quest product was probably the best for the school's situation.

I looked at the products from a support point of view and the hardware structure, and I thought that the Rapid Recovery product was most simplistic. It is easier for IT-savvy people to use it and the support is very good.

I have not yet used the synthetic incremental backup feature but I know that it is available.

With respect to how the product should change in the future, I'm pretty happy with the way that they are investing time and effort in their product. I suppose the model that they've got works for their company and also for their customers, so I think trying to make major changes to the software might not turn out too well. I think companies or IT managers or IT staff, in general, would prefer that the software not change very much.

I can recommend it to other people in the circumstances that I've got. We are just a small school, but the most important thing is that the school's data is protected. Quest does that for us. Overall, I'm very happy with Quest's software.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are primarily using the solution for backing up our critical servers and certain SQL servers.

Rapid Recovery comes with internal rapid recovery. We can make a backup for critical machines on a disk outside of our data center and it works perfectly. If something happens,  and the machine fails, we can restore it. You choose the time you want to restore and it restores anything. 

The solution offers a 100% guarantee that if it's backed up you will be able to restore it onto any platform you want.

Sometimes, when we have certain batches for Windows, it needs to be restarted. When it's restarted, the service is configured as a delayed start. Sometimes, you need to wait too long until it rights itself or you have to do it manually.

I would like it if they could offer the solution as an appliance as opposed to a software.

The solution has perfect stability.

The solution is very easy to scale. We've already increased our usage since deployment.

Technical support is very good and very helpful. They know exactly what the problem is when you call.

We previously used EMC Networker. It was an older version, 8.01, and it was very bad. It was too complicated for us. We switched because the software was complicated, the administration and support were poor, and the price was not good.  

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment took about two days. You only need one person for deployment. Maintenance is operationally delivered. It means you just restore, and make sure the backup is okay, and you're good. You need one person for maintenance and one for administration once the solution is deployed.

We had integrators assist with the implementation.

The licensing is on a yearly basis and it's perpetual. You can have the license forever if you want to. However, if you want to upgrade, you can't upgrade unless you have a support contract.

The amount the solution costs is related to space. We have about 72 terabytes.

We also looked at VMware. We also use it. We find Rapid Recovery more impressive, however.

We use the private cloud deployment model.

I would recommend the solution. Rapid Recovery is one of the most durable and rock-stable solutions. If you ever need to have a system backup, it can be restored to 100% without any issues.

Price-wise, it is similar to EMC Networker and Symantec.

I would rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use the on-prem deployment model for this solution. My primary use case of this solution is to backup my physical server. 

The fact that it can take a snapshot of everything on a server and replicate it on another server in real-time is the most valuable feature. 

You can only take a snapshot from a virtual environment. It should have the ability to take snapshots from both a virtual and physical environment. 

It's very stable. 

It was deployed by the IT department. It's not used by a user. We use it to replicate applications to another point, as another disaster recovery measure. 

We have technical support. The time difference affects their response time but we do get support when we need it. I am satisfied with their support. 

The initial setup was complex. It took a while to deploy because we had a lot of challenges. We didn't get it to a perfect, 100% point. We are managing it the way it is.  

It's very expensive which is why I want to drop it. They charge us per core and we have a six-core server. It's expensive to pay for maintenance charges. I want to switch to something cheaper. 

There are additional costs to the standard licensing fees. 

If cost isn't an issue, it's a very good solution. If you're looking at your overall, yearly costs you should look for something cheaper.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Not a ten because it's lacking features. It can only replicate from SQL to SQL, not Oracle to SQL or IBM, etc. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for backup and recovery.

The general backup for replication and virtual standby are the most valuable aspects. It does what it says it does. It's a decent tool for not a big budget.

It's buggy. That's a big problem. We're arranging to get rid of it. We're going to switch to Veeam. We've had no end of issues with it. When we got critical outages, we weren't able to rely on. It's quite frustrating but they do have some really, really good support guys. Generally speaking, they do try and get on top of these issues as quickly as possible, but I've just seen too many bugs with it. It doesn't work as I want it to work.

In the next release, they should tie up all these issues that they've got with the bugs.

It's not stable. 

It's relatively scalable. We have 21 users. 

Some of the guys they've for there are really good, some of them are useless. I would rate their technical support as a seven out of ten. 

The initial setup is relatively simple. It's not hard. 

I've experienced a lot of issues with it, so I would advise against installing it and going with Veeam. I would rate it a six out of ten.