Fast backup and clean, easy to use interface

What are the best aspects of this product?

Fast backup
Good compression
Easy to setup and manage

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

Free version is only free for a year.

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

It's great as it is

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

Having previously used Unitrends, when that crashed unrecoverably a few months ago, their support weren't willing to provide any help so I looked around for alternatives. As we use a Synology NAS, I found Nakivo would run native on that, allowing me to remove the bloated Unitrends server from our ESXi host. Unfortunately with the very limited memory in our Synology it rather struggled once Nakivo was installed so we ended up adding the Nakivo VM to our ESXi host which runs like a dream.

The Nakivo web interface is MUCH simpler than Unitrends. At first I was worried it wouldn't do what I wanted in terms of setting up daily backups, retaining weekly backups for a month, monthly backups for a year and replicating everything to an off-site archive for additional security. It took a while to get my head around how simple the interface was compared to Unitrends but then it was easy to set up the schedule and replication I needed.

It felt too simple so I was a little concerned whether it would actually do it but having been using it for many months now and having done test restores from both the live backup repository and the archive repository I'm fully confident it's doing what it should.

The most positive benefit however is the speed of backup. Our weekly full backup used to take 4 hours using Unitrends, now it takes under an hour on exactly the same hardware! Similarly the daily incremental used to take 30 minutes now it takes about 6 minutes. The reduces the load on our servers and network considerably.

The compression of the backups is also much better so where as I struggled for space on the live repository before, now I can get many more backups in much less space which is great.

I needed a little support to get the restores working initially, but despite using the free version the Nakivo support team were happy to help and quickly resolved the issue with a couple of emails unlike Unitrends who won't talk to anyone now without a paid support contract.

So, compared to the Unitrends setup I now have backups that are 4x faster, use much less space, have an interface that is very easy to use and have good support. Well done Nakivo; I wouldn't go back to Unitrends if they paid me!

UPDATE : After a year the free version expired and it's not renewable which was disappointing but because it's so easy and reliable I wanted to stick with Nakivo and managed to negotiate a reasonable price to protect our small setup. Definitely worth the money.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes