I’m looking seriously at them, (at least for residential home workstations) as they do not have a monthly license charge, simply a charge for the data they back up and keep on their servers. Any previous experiences Good or Bad?
Oddly enough I just received an email from them about their solution.
What are you liking so far?
I like the fact that they do not charge a separate license fee for their services. They only bill you based on the amount of storage you use on their servers.
Since I’m a residential MSP, I have a lot of customers, so eliminating that $5-$7 per end-point licensing fee, substantially reduces my cost, even with the cost of 1 TB being approx. $90 monthly.
Did you ever use Redstor? They have been calling me.
Hi Jim
No I haven’t pulled the trigger. I’m concerned about their pricing at $90 per TB per month.
But my current RMM (Syncro) will charge me $5 /per month per device.
I’ve got a lot of devices (200 or so) so the Restor pricing model looks appealing, I just don’t want to get caught up with a huge storage bill.
Gotta say I don’t have a good handle to the total amount of storage I’d need, but one machine back up about 200 GB.
I’d talk to them.
Roger
I had a conversation with Redstor today. They were more focused on my server backups than the file-level backups. I don’t use syncro backup for servers.
I have a meeting with them next week to discuss more details and setup a trial. I really need to tinker with it for myself.
I’ll be happy to provide updates and information as I proceed.
Have you had any luck with Redstor?
I’m thinking of giving them a second look, as Syncro’s pricing does not work with my customer base.
I have finally got it installed on one workstation. I only have 1GB available for the trial. I have selected a single folder on the test computer but it still says I am exceeding my limit and will not backup.
The interface is not intuitive.
I saw the email today announcing the end of life for the syncro backup. I will be looking at several products. I wish I knew what direction Syncro is pursuing. I’ll probably find a solution just before they announce what they are going to do. It’s just the way my luck runs!
I have finally finished investigating alternate backup solutions for endpoints.
Redstor - is a bit complicated to use and deploy. However, pricing was the main deterrent. $0.09\GB for storage and no endpoint cost. I had some errors on the backups that seemed to contradict the “Successful Backup”. I was told I could\should ignore the errors. That’s OK but I would still have to check the logs each time to be sure it was an ignorable error.
I decided to go with MSP360. They have special pricing of $1 for desktops and $0.023\GB for AWS storage. The only catch is that AWS can be the only Cloud Storage you can use. Otherwise, the $1 goes to $5. (Not sure about the increase for the storage.) MSP360 is also easy to deploy and manage.
1TB backup with Redstor is $90\month vs MSP360 @ $24\month.
Good luck. I used to use MSP360 but switched a few months ago to my own hosted Comet and have loved it ever since. I can do every type of backup I need from 1 console. And Wasabi storage is dirt cheap.
I like MSP360 personally. I like the flexibility to backup to just about any cloud storage as well as the local options as well. Their interface is simple and clean IMO.
What problems caused you to change?
I had problems with every solution I tested. I seem to be the guy that always has issues. I use these issues to call tech support to determine the quality of support I should expect. To me, I’m not looking for just a backup solution, I’m looking for a solution with good support. I manage and monitor over 400 endpoints and I don’t have time to sit on hold for three hours to get some yahoo that can’t provide good support. It’s actually a very important part of my testing.
Customers pay me for support. If I can’t get support from a vendor, I cannot provide support to my customer. I don’t make excuses when this happens because the support to my customer is on me, not my vendor. My vendors need to support me when I need it.
How many time have you said: “If I knew support was this bad I would not have purchased this from XinsertcompanyhereX.”?
I have tested Unitrends, Kaseya Direct-To-Cloud (now, also Unitrends), Gilware, Datto (now Kaseya), Acronis, Redstor, novabackup, SyncroMSP\Comet and a couple others that were so bad they are not worth mentioning.
That said, MSP360 tech support was quick and very helpful. That’s one reason why I’m going with them.
I’ve also had positive and quick support with MSP360, also one of the reasons I chose them.
Biggest issue was consolidation. I was unable to get MSP360 to backup a server or VM properly. So I was using Altaro for servers and before that Veeam. I was tired of using multiple backup vendors for backup. So I reached out to Comet to do a trial. I had my vm up and running and installed my own server in 15 mins. Configured some clients for a test, and quickly found that the compression rate that Comet uses is so much better. I am saving about 25% of storage compared to the server backups I was doing with Altaro, and the workstation backups I was doing with MSP360.
I also like being able to control my own instance.
With Comet, updates come out weekly. Support is really easy to get to and they answer questions very fast. I used them a lot to get up and going, asking general questions, but haven’t had to ask any questions in a few months. The product just works.
Also, since I am using Comet directly, I have all the control to do what I want, and don’t have to go through the Syncro front end, which I understand is what was giving everyone the issues they’ve had. Direct to Comet, have no problems like I have seen with the Syncro product.
In the end, the compression is what sold me. And being able to de-dupe at the client level. So if I back up 10 - Windows 10 workstations, I only have to have 1 set of bits for the O/S, saving me a ton of storage.
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We are back with Comet for PCs and Servers.
I did have problems a year or so ago, with backups of laptops not cancelling properly when laptops went offline. The result was a lot of skipped backups even when the laptops came back online.
This forced me to look elsewhere, and I tried Veeam Service Provider Console. VSPC was attractive because we use for Veeam Backup for Office 365 (VBO).
But sadly, I couldn’t get VSCP to be reliable even for desktops and servers, and support for VSCP wasn’t good.
As we still had some PCs on our Comet servers I found that Comet had fixed the issues I previously had. So we have migrated all other endpoints back to Comet.
We will stick with Veeam Backup for Office 365 though, as it has been rock solid with excellent support.
Another update… sorry.
Although, I am waiting on my final price quote, I have decided to stay with Unitrends.
I have used their Recovery-Max appliances for over 5 years. It has enabled me to recover one Ransomware infection that killed the server and one catastrophic failure where the server was unplugged while running and never booted again. It provide local backups for quick recoveries and cloud replication for safe keeping. I can do file-level or image-based backups with forever retention.
- They provide the appliance at no cost.
- They give you unlimited storage at no cost.
- Deployment is easy.
- They have made improvements to the portals and features.
- They are working to get better at support. (Poor support is why I had decided to get away from them.)
- This has been the most reliable backup for servers I have used since I started my MSP business 23 years ago.
The product for Desktop Backups is called Unitrends Endpoint Backup. I’m not sure they want me to post the price so I will say that I am paying < $5 for a single license.
The product for Microsoft 365 is called Spanning and costs me <$1 per user.
All of that said… they still have to prove they can provide better support. I have tickets open right now - we’ll see how it goes.
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Sadly Unitrends is Kaseya. I will not touch them.
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OK. I got my price quote. Clearly I did not fully understand the new pricing. The pricing they gave me was heavily discounted but still nearly doubled from what I have been paying. They said it was because I was given such amazing pricing when I first got the appliances.
So, MSP360 is the solution I will use. Management is easy and I haven’t seen better pricing for storage space. $23\TB.
I will use a local NAS to keep local backup copies.
The only feature I will lose is the ability to spin-up a VM on the backup appliance.