What needs improvement with Nakivo?

NAKIVO should broaden its horizons in terms of compatibility and integration with other tools. For instance, it would be beneficial to test its integration with other virtual environments like Proxmox, as I have not yet had the opportunity to conduct the necessary tests for this new proposal from NAKIVO. Additionally, integrating the tool with ERP systems and monitoring tools is essential. Lastly, I would suggest putting more effort into making the user interface more intuitive to enhance the backup management experience.

While NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an excellent product, there are a few areas where it could be improved. The reporting features could be enhanced to provide more detailed and customizable reports for better insights into backup operations. Also, the user interface, while generally user-friendly, could benefit from further refinement to make navigation and configuration even more intuitive. Improved support for a wider range of cloud storage providers would also be beneficial, giving users more flexibility in their backup options.

In the future, the solution should provide a more granular backup. If the virtual machine has an Oracle or MySQL database, I need to get a backup from this database, and not a complete virtual machine.

While NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers valuable features, there are areas for improvement needed. Firstly, addressing compatibility issues and streamlining collaboration with storage solutions like QNAP would enhance the product's reliability. Additionally, improving the process of transferring configurations between versions would reduce administrative overhead and ensure smoother transitions. In terms of additional features for the next release, incorporating more advanced reporting capabilities would provide deeper insights into backup status and performance metrics. Enhanced support for virtualized environments, such as integration with hypervisor-specific features or support for emerging virtualization technologies, would further bolster the product's versatility and appeal to a wider range of users. Moreover, implementing more comprehensive data deduplication and compression techniques could optimize storage utilization and reduce backup times, improving overall efficiency. Finally, enhancing disaster recovery functionalities, such as faster recovery times and more granular recovery options, would strengthen the product's value proposition in ensuring business continuity and resilience.

While Nakivo delivers comprehensive solutions, there's room for enhancement, particularly regarding Proxmox support. Expanding capabilities to fully support Proxmox environments would streamline backup and recovery processes for those utilizing this platform, ensuring consistent protection across various virtualization systems. Additionally, improving deduplication functionality could further optimize storage efficiency. More aggressive space reclaiming features would maximize storage utilization, allowing for cost-effective scaling. Enhanced deduplication and space reclamation are vital in managing growing data volumes, and ensuring system efficiency while safeguarding critical information.

Sometimes, for some VMs and some Windows Server versions, specifically old versions (aka server 12 or older) fail due to the VSS writer error or locking file system. It takes a long time to finish and another job could start, so the first job may not finish, or expire unfinished. That said, that's a software-specific problem of the hosted server edition, and not Nakivo-related. A fix could be to raise the time needed to end the job or solve the VSS writers on the operating system, in order to succeed.

The location of the product is important. So far, there is no version that supports Polish. If such a version existed, many customers in our region would decide to purchase and implement this solution. The graphical interface could be improved. Real-time replication allows you to instantly send data to a secondary site to create an exact copy of virtual machines (VMs) and continuously update that copy as changes are made to the original VM. It's in beta, and there's no word on when the release version will be available. This is an important functionality that allows you to ensure business continuity by activating the replica in the event of a failure.

The product needs to improve backup speed and replication speed.

One complaint I have is the dashboard flashing as it reloads/refreshes itself. The program was not always like that and it happened after an update at some point. When it refreshes the dashboard the whole screen flashes and all the squares that held information, like the charts that show data transfer and other things, all blink out and reload at the same time. Refreshing all those in real-time should be possible without having them behave that way. Sometimes I get confused with the retention settings versus what is actually being backed up.

I would love to see compatibility with KVM Backup. We would appreciate seeing Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) supported to provide reliable backup to this virtualization host. Another feature that we would find helpful would be the possibility to update automatically all the transporter (local and remote) when updating the director. This will make the system update process faster and easier to deploy in more complicated infrastructures with multiple repositories and transporters.

We'd like to see more cooperation with Synology. It can be enhanced to get updates published faster to Synology's store. I don't have any other complaints about Nakivo Backup, and I like it as it is. I have used many other backups solutions like Veeam, Actifio, and Acronis, and Nakivo has done things better than those other backup solution providers. Of course, there can be some cases where others might perform better; however, for my use case, Nakivo Backup does just what is needed, and it is done properly without problems.

We'd like to see a legacy environment backup, like AIX, etc.

It could improve in terms of monitoring systems more in-depth. For example, having an alert for power outages or if RAM is in critical condition. It would d be good to have a broader portfolio of integrations with other alerting options. This would be good for companies that have limited resources and want everything in a single pane of glass. It could be a little bit faster in terms of backup and offer more reliable SQL server backups. Sometimes it wasn't as reliable. It could support some older/legacy systems so that companies that need modernization can use Nakivo to migrate VMs. As an example, we had a legacy VMWare ESXi 4.1 server that we couldn't migrate using Nakivo.

In terms of features right now there isn't anything we want. Of course, we want Nakivo to keep updating the product for errors and offer continuous support for old as well as the new VMware ESXi, and HyperV. For us, it would be best to improve the speed of the backup instead of adding new features. Nakivo is fast enough now, however, if it could be faster at encrypting or compressing, that would be ideal.

We would like to back up File Shares to Amazon S3/Wasabi. Email notifications should allow for the subject to be customizable and permit the use of some predefined variables (like {JOBNAME}, {DATETIME}, {JOBRESULT}) that will be substituted when mail is sent. The backup view of a repository could be adjusted. In addition to the Name, Job, and Size columns, it would also be useful to see the number of recovery points for each object and the backup type for each row. The backup view of a VM repository is necessary. If you have several protected virtual machines, you have correspondingly different pages to navigate to reach a specific VM. After entering the detail view of a backup, when you click "<" on the page, you are returned to the first page of the repository instead of being returned to the nth page you were on before. Alternatively, having a field where you set the number of rows to show would help. Also, with the backup view of a VM repository, it would be nice to have a tooltip showing the summary data of the backup you are hovering over (or by clicking the hyperlink).

In models TS-231P/TS-431X you have to run Transporter as VM at ESXi host - which is not simple to do. Deploying the VM from Nakivo B&R's web console always crushes with time expired. Of course, you can download Transporter_Repository.ova and import it directly to ESXi, then you need to configure it manually and add/connect in Nakivo. The VM Transporter_Repository.ova needs to configure the IP Address. Transporter Onboard (at Qnap) doesn't need an IP Address. I've no other needs. The free version covers my security completely.

One of the things I liked least about this software is when an update was pushed to one of the servers we had, somehow we didn't receive the update and needed some quick troubleshooting. That said, the customer service team was able to help out within the hour and was amazing and very helpful from the first reply. Like you cant go wrong with their customer support team. If you have a problem, an inquiry, or just a general question about what you can do or how else you can incorporate it they will answer your question to your satisfaction within the first two replies - unlike a lot of other support teams that just follow scripts and procedures, these guys get right down to the point from the first email.

Updating VM tools on a replicated VM could be better. One of the most important things Nakivo can do is stop releasing a new version several times a year. It's important to "get it right" on a version release. Too many updates will cause an issue. Any version update should include the ESXi Host as well as the Center - not taking into consideration the vCenter version is a huge mistake and no updates should be released unless they also support the current vCenter version. That came up and I had several issues before I figured out it was a vCneter update compatibility issue.

In the next release, I would like for them to add restore in physical machines. They should also improve the speed of "Reclaim unused space" in the repository.

I would like to see some additional models in the next release to make backups more functional.

We have a lot of clients on the network and we need to back up their local files. Space is always an issue and we try to backup just the files in certain folders, which the users are aware of. A good solution would be if we could create backups of files and folders from the users' local machine. It might sound old-fashioned, however, we are limited on space and this solution will be a great feature. The user might lose their laptop or have it stolen, so having a backup of their local files would be just what we need.

There is always room for improvement statistics could be a little better (job compare, overall job performance), however, Nakivo is a complete product with a lot to offer. Adding new items to the configuration is simple. The backups run fast, and the recovery and replication options are also easy to use. Job reports are clear. We plan to expand our backup system to workstations as we only backup Hyper-V. More statistic options would be a great feature.

Nakivo's implementation documentation could use a little beefing up. There was a section of the implementation where we got stuck and had to contact Nakivo support to fix it. It was a very simple fix, and once we got past it, the remainder of the implementation went very smoothly. In addition, Nakivo's support team is very easy to work with. They were quick and got us up and running right away. Ideally, we would have preffered to have the documentation accurate so we didn't need to engage with the support, however, it all worked out in the end.

They need to add a failover feature to the Essential Pro license in case the environment is a simple virtual environment and the client does not need to upgrade.

There is a familiar error that pops up and that is a VM error as much as it is a Nakivo error. It says that the job couldn't calm the VM and restores might be impacted. That error is, to say the least, a bit scary. I have seen this type of error on other backup systems also. I'm not really sure what can be done with VSS writers, et cetera, however, maybe VMware and Nakivo should get together and solve the issue. A reboot of the VM and/or reinstallation of VMware tools nearly always solve the issue on the specified guest.

Personally, I would like to have the ability to backup older legacy systems on the new versions as well. I'd like the ability to perform individual backups (so a backup from inside the system instead of on the host side) - which right now is limited to newer Operating Systems, which, while is a good thing from a security point of view. That said, sometimes there is an older machine or VM which could use backups like this. For our usage, we've found the connections to remote shares (like CIFS or NFS) while quite easy to set up are a little bit prone to interruption. Of course, in the next availability check performed autonomously by Nakivo, the connection is restored. This could of course be a problem with the destination share, however, it's really the only "issue" we've had with this software.

In the next release, it would be good to have ability/feature to backup only Oracle database from the Linux OS beside backing up whole VM.

The solution needs a high availability feature in case of loss on the primary site. This would be very attractive as a part of configuration backup. Another great additional feature would be an automatic upgrade of the transporter package in case of an upgrade of full product. In my environment, I have many transporters at different datacenters and I need to perform a manual upgrade process at this time. Storage snapshot integration for the EMC Unity appliance is another missing feature. Log and report creation can be improved. The graphical user interface can be made better.

The feature that has a backup repository, like QNAP + ext. HDD's could be improved. We sometimes have trouble with that and it would be nice if they had a solution on the way. Updating VM Tools on a replicated VM could be better. Support for the backup and replication of virtual machines is excellent, however, improved support for physical machine backups would be very welcome (I believe this is already on the way). A mobile app for administration would be appreciated. The user interface could use a bit of refreshing, however, on the other hand, it runs very smoothly, so if that would change how it runs I'd rather live with the user interface looking a bit dated.

There are not many features we are missing at this moment with Nakivo Backup & Replication. If it would be perhaps possible to add some more details and information in the activities tab or links from graphics to logs, that would be useful. For HyperV, we need to extract VMDK from OVA files and convert them to VHDX. It would be easier to have a direct download of VHDX files. It would be a good thing to have some use case and architecture examples online to understand integration in complex infrastructure. Visio stencils are missing. They would help us build schemas.

The only thing we have encountered that we would like to see improved in the future are error messages. They could be more detailed and helpful, without the need to send logs to support. Failing that, the part of the log related to the error could be displayed alongside the error message, so I can investigate the error without looking through all of those logs that I'm able to download. In the future, I'll be glad for implementing AI that could automatically assume what backup plan and retention do we need.

The web interface is very complete and it has many useful options. When starting to use it, it can be a little difficult to understand every option that it has but, when you get used to it and work with it, it is a very comfortable tool. There is a lack of native (web-based) update functionality. To update the Linux appliance, you need to download a script and run commands from SSH. This is unacceptable. There's a lack of appliance format in Hyper-V format (why only a VMware native format? They should release a VHD file appliance). Overall, the evolution of the product is good.

At the moment the solution is just great for our needs.

At the moment, there are actually not many features I am missing. It would be good if I could have a remote upgrade of our Synology Transporters, but the manual upgrade is easy and no problem at all. Some SNMP features to configure our monitor software would be great since emails sent to me sometimes could be lost in all those other mails. Some customers from Germany might have a problem when contacting English speaking sales and support team, but that has never been a problem to me, although my English hasn't been used much in the last couple of years.

Updating VM Tools on a replicated VM could be better. I think one of the most important things NAKIVO can do is stop releasing a new version several times a year. It's important to "get it right" on a version release - too many updates will cause an issue. Also, any version update should include the ESXi Host as well as the vCenter. Not taking into consideration the vCenter version is a huge mistake and no updates should be released unless they also support the current vCenter version. That came up and I had several issues before I figured out it was a vCneter update compatibility issue.

The Nakivo Backup & Recovery product is already a very complete product and fully satisfies all of our current needs. Lately, thanks to the personalized presentation that was made to us by both the marketing and technical teams, we have learned about the new features released in the latest versions. Among these, the ability of having the replica of our Virtual Machines in a dormant state and ready to be activated in case of problems on the primary site has great value on the Disaster Recovery site. In the press releases, it would be useful to make sure that the manual space reclaim procedure does not have to be performed but that it happens automatically, thus optimizing the use of space.

In the future, I would like to see support for backing up data to more cloud platforms, besides Amazon. It is a great start, given that Amazon is the largest cloud provider, but smaller companies use smaller clouds. The tape backup capability can be also improved, perhaps by adding a cache for older and slower tapes.

I would like to have a built-in SNMP client, which is important if we want to monitor it using Zabbix, Nagios, or another monitoring solution.The snmp protocol can be used for monitoring systems,to ask the statuses of all process.If the software has some problem,freezes etc,it cant send an email of its status,but snmp can discovers problems.The snmp client can be installed manually.So altough its not a big loss,but nice if we have it built in. It would be helpful if there were more cloud services supported as a backup repository.Now only amazon services is available,but there is other smaller cloud providers too.

I would like to see support for backing up from other platforms, such as physical machines. The mail recovery options could be improved. We used this feature often but it's a bit slow. Sometimes, the backup speed to the NFS repository that we use in our environment drops from 400 MB/s to 50 MB/s, but it might be a problem in the network, which is something that we're investigating.

Integrations maybe helpful for NAKIVO. I think end-to-end backup and user backup will be useful to have. The price could be reduced as well. I also think that AD integration should be more available.

It'll help if they offered some automation and more usability for partners.

My first thought was maybe the GUI could be improved, although it works.

Automatic updates do not work, and every update has to be done manually. I've upgraded twice, from 10.0 to 10.0.1 and then to 10.1.1. A mobile app for administration would be appreciated. The user interface could use a bit of refreshing; however, on the other hand, it runs very smoothly, so if that would change I can live with the user interface looking a bit dated. I would like to see some more detailed data regarding backups. For example, a pie chart representing the various virtual machines or other backups and how much space they need would be helpful to have.

There are some errors that we need support to correct. We would like the bugs and glitches to be fixed.

I would love to see BackBlaze B2 implementation in the future, as that would be our preferred cloud destination, but Amazon and Wasabi are both very great choices in the meantime. Other cloud initiatives would give this product a distinct advantage over other products. Other than that, I don't see any other areas that I can see for improvement. The product has several different tiers, all of which are easy to understand. The product works just as well as advertised, and is easy to implement into an organization.

From our experience, the main factor that could be improved is adding more cloud services that are supported as a backup repository. Many customers have active subscriptions with services like Dropbox or Google Drive and have asked us to use those as the backup repository. For now, those services aren't supported. Another minor thing that could be added is the capability to granularly recover objects for more types of databases, including some open-source ones like MySQL or PostgreSQL. This could be useful in some full Linux environments, avoiding having to recover the whole virtual machine.

At the moment I am pleased with what Nakivo does but I would like more reporting functions and if possible, integration with my RMM system.

I would think that as it's used in larger environments that might be more than one server, and you're going to need a better authentication mechanism. For example, integration into Active Directory or some other form of LDAP would be helpful. I had to manually install SNMP, which wasn't hard, but a step I had to take, to plug this into the monitoring system.

As we are using the product for only three months, I don't have any important improvement points that I can mention here. So far, Nakivo backup works fine and does exactly what we are expecting from it. From an administrator usage perspective, the interface is very intuitive, but maybe the wizard for creating and modifying backup jobs could look a little fancier. I consider this to be only a very small improvement point and it definitely has no impact on the capabilities of the Nakivo backup solution.

There has been a slight tendency to bloat, where each new feature uses slightly more resources. It would be helpful to be able to have a custom footprint so that only the required features are installed.

In the future, it would be nice to have support for Zimbra email, Collabora Office, and the NextCloud content collaboration platform.

Really not sure about this, because everything works great! The only complaint I might have is that restoring Exchange and AD objects seem to require some tweaking. So far it has always worked, but I have had to look up the database, rather than have Nakivo Backup and Restore automatically detect it. This is not a big deal. In the loading of a backup, choosing what to restore seems to be a lengthy process, but it has always worked in my restore tests.

We are satisfied with Nakivo, but if anything could be improved, I think it would be more real-time as opposed to email support availability.

What must be improved is the response time to technical support requests.

It would be interesting if it were possible to integrate a mobile app to monitor the system in real-time.

While many useful cloud-based improvements and enhancements are added with each release, we would like the ability to do raw metal restores from bootable media. Using an independent bootable media to restore full physical machines would enable physical machines that may be serving as Nakivo Director or Transport machines to be reliably restored to service without undue delay, ensuring that an enterprise's local environment remains intact.

While the solution provides mostly what we need, it would be ideal if there were some additional feature capabilities for the API. I can't really specify which features are missing, as they've done everything that we've asked for so far. Our plate is full of getting what they've done into the marketplace. It's going to take us another two, three months to do that, including engineering work and testing and that type of stuff. I wouldn't be able to answer the question of if there are missing features for at least another three to six months.

I do not know that I see a lot that needs to be improved with Nakivo. It seems maybe that the interface could be a little bit better, but it is what it is. You can always improve on the interface on anything. For me, I just work with the product in a simple way. For instance, I have not even looked into whether you can hook it up with Active Directory which may be helpful if you are going to add different users and give them the capability to back up or do certain other tasks. You might be able to do that already now. I just have not had the need or opportunity to look into it. If it is not there it is the type of thing that might be added.

I would like to have the option of creating a subfolder per job in the backup repository because we had an issue where some files were corrupted and we lost the backup of the majority of the VMs. I would like a clearer log of errors. I enabled the schedule for space reclamation on the repository, but after one day I found that the repository was detached and the GUI didn’t give a status of the scheduled task.

We want the backup job to consume fewer resources, as the utilization is very high if we choose the "best compression' option. There was a problem we found regarding the repostory. When we enable the schedule for space reclaimation, once the schedule is trigerred the reclaimation will detach the repository but after 1 week we found that the repository is on detach status so we should detach it manuallu. We didn't know actually the reclaimation is on progress or already finsihed

An improvement would be to include a general data backup solution that is not only for virtual machines. Translate and develop the user interface in other languages like Spanish, Catalan, Basque, etc.

The software is aimed at backing up VM images but it would be nice to have an option to just backup certain files/folders and not the entire disk.

I think it is important to work not only in replicating the virtual machines in Amazon AWS but in other cloud systems. I want to have replicas in the cloud at a more competitive cost.

An improvement would be to give us more control over the email alerts, with different emails going to different addresses based on a set of rules.

I like how it is, and I don't think it needs improvements. In your next release, you might want to include the different types of AWS backups that are included with Nakivo.

I think the product should be improved on the integrations — for example, integration with HPE StoreOnce.