ShadowProtect

Excellent backup and restore for physical servers

Comments: This product has been king of physical server backups for a long time. They have started to bolt-on features to better support virtual environments and recovery, and offer cloud services. Unfortunately these are clearly additions to the base product and not revisions to it, meaning that management is not very slick and it doesn't make commercial sense when stacked against the competition. But if you just have a couple of physical servers and want a robust backup solution with recovery you can rely on, this is a good product.

Pros:

Easy to install and use. Plenty of options for backup routines and destinations. The recovery to same or dissimilar hardware is rock solid. They have a cloud backup offering that is competitively priced. Support is usually good once you engage with them. Most issues come down to something outside the product, i.e. not uninstalling a previously solution first. Once up and running it can be relied upon to produce consistently good backups.

Cons:

Cumbersome to manage multiple backups for multiple servers. The central management tool they offer is still very much a work in progress. Expensive per-server compared a lot of alternative products. The cloud backup runs separately to the main application, giving you another thing to manage. Retention policies are easily broken just by modifying a backup job, which can lead to them being ignored and filling storage.

ShadowProtect SPX has always come through when we have needed it

Pros:

We have had success with ShadowProtect in some tough circumstances and it has come through with flying colors when have needed it most. Mount failed storage arrays from backup and up and running in minutes after diagnosing issue. Boot failed servers to virtual machines - yep done it and worked great. Restored countless deleted files.

Cons:

Managing the product and alerts can get unwieldy in large deployments. The biggest problem is their lack of product support. It can take days to hear back from an engineer and they will likely be a low tier engineer who at best can triage your issue and get it to the right person. They outsourced all of their support to India which is okay if you do it right, but I don't think their staff know the product. We have been some issues with their cloud backups recently and getting an engineer to look at those problems in a timely manner has been a challenge. We have found it more productive to reseed the backup and send it back to the data center than to work with their support.

* * * DISAPPOINTING SCAM * * *

Comments: 2+ years before the built in shutdown bomb triggered.

Pros:

Does what I want, when it works, usually 3 days of 6 days scheduled. It errors out without notice when the backup storage external drive doesn't instantly wake up and salute as soon as ShadowProtect pings once. But I can live with 3 full backups every week.....if the software had not self-destructed.

Cons:

During the usual monthly safety check found the screen hobbled. The important buttons (backup, restore, etc.) have been disabled and all others produce a 404 error, webpage cannot be found. Several hours later I gave up on tech support and called SALES. A "tech support" person responded to my message forwarded by Sales. She tried the old "Microsoft Update Error" blame game. As a Visual Basic engineer of 24+ years I know what Windows OS errors produce. It does NOT shut down software in an orderly, selective manner. I told her THIS event was clearly deliberate. She said the software must be uninstalled and replaced by a newer version with their help of course. THREE TIMES I asked what this "newer version" would cost, which she ignored apparently thinking I would have no choice, that my system had blown up or something and I couldn't restore it without paying whatever the price. WRONG ! I have Raid with dual drives and tiers of protective software. Thus, as I can no longer trust my small business data to a software provider which tries to try to leverage existing customers to pay "error motivated ransom" to access the data if needed, I told her she was trying to scam a software pro... and bye bye.

ShadowProtect including ImageManager and ShadowStream

Comments: Always saved the day when disaster struck so the overall experience is excellent.

Pros:

We are still using the legacy software and we've experienced numerous physical Windows server failures in the past. ShadowProtect has always successfully restored the entire image to the same or different hardware.

Cons:

StorageCraft eventually released an excellent new solution for Hyper-V but it took too long and we had already moved to a competitor. At the moment, we still wouldn't use the new solution because it's suitable for SMBs who have their own servers on-site and most of our customers now use our private cloud solutions because we have our on datacentre servers.

Shadow protect is great for onsite and offsite backup

Comments: Only have had restore issues on SBS Servers
All other devices have been great in a disaster recovery situation.
The product is good and with the new cloud addition, monitoring is so much easier

Pros:

Its very cost effective, been around for years and has a good market share, meaning the reliability of the product is tested well and any bugs are ironed out pretty quick.

Cons:

Installation isnt a few clicks. Need third party hardware to complete a full DR solution Would be great to have an all in one solution with direct support