Carbonite Server Reviews

I work for a managed services provider, and we supply the solution for various sized customers.

The Bare Metal Recovery/Image Recovery plugins are invaluable and have been used several times to get customers up and running when most other systems failed them.

SQL granular recovery has earned its place in this product and has proved to be very useful.

The ability to perform instant recovery would be a game changer.

For a large user base, the creation of user accounts at this time is a little cumbersome, there isn't any Single-Sign-On (SSO) integration you can do within their portal currently. I would like to see more granular control over the permissions per user.

I have been using Carbonite Server since 2013.

It is very rare that you have an issue. 

It's very reliable.

Scalability is easy enough with the product although you do have to roll out the agents one by one per server to be protected, unless on a hypervisor platform.

I have always had a good experience with customer support, and it was good even in the early days when I started with it. I've been through all their different iterations since 2013.

Positive

For most technical users the setup and initial deployment are fairly straightforward and once deployed it 99% of the time looks after itself.

Installation of the agents is similar to most other products in that it has an install wizard to guide you, the accompanying documentation is also very useful to assist wherever you are in the agent install and policy setup process.

Normally our customers' IT team does the deployment of agents, however, this isn't a daunting task unless you are dealing with multiple servers to protect the product.

On a server-by-server basis, the deployment doesn't take long.

From the MSP side of things, the infrastructure sitting behind the scenes doesn't take too much to install, configure and maintain.

We deployed the solution in-house.

When reviewing the logs, they are nicely structured and use the same format every time, from a technical standpoint this makes error determination quick. The error codes and the information that the logs provide are generally enough to get you through what's wrong.

When planning your backup selections, work out if these can be split into multiple backup jobs to aid in recovery times or ease of restoration processes. 

If you require a faster recovery time (low RTO), I'd suggest using a Carbonite appliance, the purpose of this is to provide a fast restore on your local network from your most recent backups.

If you plan to use the product's BMR/BMI functionality, ensure you have created the recovery media before you need it. It's not always clear that you need to make that ISO/bootable USB, you will need it for complete system failures.

We primarily use the solution as a major off-site backup since it's on multiple servers. I can get a quick either flash drive, or I could download files. I used it to switch computers before as far as my content and this helped ensure I could access everything. 

The efficiency and convenience are excellent. 

The pricing is very good. 

It shows you what has been updated via little green dots.

The solution is very automatic. I don't have to worry about it. 

It was easy to set up.

Technical support has been helpful in the past.

The solution has been problem-free.

I don't have any notes for improvement. 

It could be a little bit easier or faster to be able to access data files without having to download anything. 

The solution is very reliable. It's been issue-free. 

I haven't used technical support for a couple of years. The solution has been pretty issue-free. 

Positive

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was not too complex. Sometimes it does take some time to get a complete image on a new computer. 

A deployment would typically take a day or so. I do have a lot of stuff. 

The solution doesn't require any maintenance. I had to restart it a few times in the past. However, that hasn't happened recently.

The pricing is quite reasonable. I'd rate the affordability nine out of ten. 

I'm a customer and end-user.

This is a simple, efficient, reliable product that offers good value. I would recommend it. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

I am using Carbonite Server Backup to protect my VMware, vSphere, and vSAN configuration, which is a 7.0 vSAN 4 node cluster. It provides application consistency and data protection for my virtual environment, but most importantly, it also protects my complex servers. We have a hybrid deployment. It is deployed on the cloud as well as on-premises.

The Granular Restore of SQL feature has been a lifesaver more times than I can count. One of the main reasons for looking at Carbonite was their support for platforms like AIX and AS/400 Series.

The support for object storage isn't quite there yet. Its public cloud support can be improved. I would love to see the public cloud support for object storage, and it would be great, but what I always hear from the folks at Carbonite is that in a lot of cases, it directly competes with their cloud offering. So, I don't know when or where that will go or if that will go anywhere, but we are hopeful to see something.

The dashboard is a little outdated. If they gave it a facelift and put some better design around their dashboard, that would be tremendous. I generally care less about the visual aesthetics of an application as long as it does what it needed to do, which is true in the case of this solution.

We also have the Microsoft 365 platform. Because they're two separate platforms, I have to log in to my Microsoft platform to manage it, and I have to log into my Carbonite server backup platform to manage it. Having these two coexist together in one management console is really what we're looking for, but we went for it knowing this. We also knew that there would be some integration coming down the road. So, we're again hoping to see some of that coming in 2021.

I have been using this solution for the better part of a year now.

So far, so good. We've currently protected about 35 terabytes with them. Every now and again, we get a hiccup or two, but it is usually to do with the volume shadow copy services.

It has been pretty easy for us to manage. We have four users. Two of us are in it on a day-to-day basis. My manager checks on it every now and then.

I had to interface with their technical support only once. It wasn't a bad experience. I wouldn't grade it as an outstanding experience either. There are certain things that you have to go through in their tier one to finally solve your problem. 

We also have a technical account engineer assigned to our account. Because we have that technical account engineer assigned to our account from their customer success team, it has made things much easier for us in trying to solve issues when they come up.

It was straightforward. It is not too hard to install an application these days. However, there were just a couple of things that took us a while to figure out. 

As we were going through this transition and installing and configuring everything, we noticed that the documentation wasn't really publicly available on the web. That has changed since then, and it has made things tremendously easier for us when searching for how to set up an API call to pull a report. The documentation was there. It is just you had to log into Salesforce, and then you had to go find the document. Now it is all searchable in the knowledge base on their public website.

We used professional services from Carbonite.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. We've had a really good experience with it so far. We've already gone through an audit to leverage their platform to actually clear that audit. The reason for purchasing professional services from them wasn't necessarily because we needed assistance in installing it. It was more because of the documentation of the environment after it is installed, which bodes very well for organizations like ours where you've got regulatory compliance that you have to adhere to.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that you should know different types of backups before you start implementing them because there are so many.

I would rate Carbonite Server a seven out of ten just because there are things that we would like it to do.

I use Carbonite for our cloud backups. It backs up my computers including the documents and key programs. Really, I have only had to use it a couple of times to restore computers or transfer everything to another computer one time. It has done the job reliably and without any surprises.  

This product has an automatic simplicity to it. It does not slow down the computer and stays light on the resources.  

I read that Carbonite may be switching to USB restoral and recovery media. That would definitely be something that I want to make sure is true and probably could make use of.  

I think I may have even been using Carbonite Server from before 2010, but it has been at least ten years.  

I would not really know how to judge stability. It has been efficient for us as a small business and we have not experienced any obvious misfires.  

We currently have three staff members in our organization using Carbonite Server. We are not really putting scalability to the test and probably will not as far as the number of users in the near future.  

We rarely had to use technical support in the entire time that I have used the product. It is rare that I have had to use it, but the couple of times that I did, our issues were handled quickly and effectively.  

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, I guess. We did not need to use an integrator or consultant for the deployment and we were able to manage that ourselves.  

I think the pricing is between $120 and $150 per year. I do not remember exactly off the top of my head, but it is within that range.  

The advice that I have for people looking into using Carbonite Server is that it seems reliable and easy to use. I would recommend it if you need this kind of solution.  

On a scale of one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Carbonite Server as a nine or even a ten-out-of-ten. That may be because I am not an expert in this type of solution, but it does everything I expect it to and does not get in the way while doing it. I am very happy with it.  

The solution is used to back up the container.

The solution is a free engine to help work with the container.

The stability has room for improvement.

I have used the solution within the last year.

I give the stability a seven out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

A special team was required to set up the solution.

We used a consultant for the implementation.

The solution is open source.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

Only one administrator is required for maintenance and monitoring.

Carbonite Server has a large community and I recommend the solution.

We are a managed service provider. We provide backup as a service to our customers. We use Carbonite for our customers.

Easy verification of things is the most valuable feature.

The only thing that I would like to see improved is related to marketing. Currently, it is very difficult to find the right paper and stuff for me. Their marketing department should provide better information because currently, it is very difficult to find information on the internet. It was bought over by OpenText, and you won't be able to find a lot of information about this solution on their site.

They should also provide training facilities for commercial purposes. Some of my colleagues recently went for pilot training, and they were technical. If I want to get trained, the training has to be more commercial. Currently, there is no such training for users like me.

I have been using this solution for three years.

I was using FieldCloud. When you have to restore it, Carbonite takes a lot of time.

Its price is reasonable.

I would rate Carbonite Server a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for different things, like for DR replication for some controllers. That's our primary use case. 

The replication and the time frame of the solution is very good. The replication bytes are phenomenal. Also, when you do a failover, it's just one push of a button for it to go to the DR site, that's all. 

I would like to see an improvement on the management user interface, as well as Kellion integrations. Also, cloud options and virtualization are not integrated, so if that comes into the picture, it would be really nice. 

We have you been using this solution for about three or four months.

The solution is very stable. I've never seen any bugs or glitches.

The solution is scalable enough for our purposes. It's all on the licensing part, so you just add the license and the you can scale. There are no issues with that. On the licensing bundle we have sold about 3,000 or more licenses. And then we have about 15 end users, all admins or integrators. We have one person for deployment and maintenance, and one person for admin.

We use our integrators for deployment and they sort out our issues solutions as well. So I haven't used the technical support option yet.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's not complex at all and I did everything myself. The deployment took about three hours to complete.

We pay 9,000 dollars per year for our license. There are no additional costs for technical support or warranties; that's all included. The pricing is moderate, and when you compare the features, it's actually fair.

I only reviewed Carbonite. It was good and I used it, so I did not evaluate any other options.

This solution is very simple to use and I will recommend it to anybody. In the next release I would like to see an improvement in the auto failover option. Right now the failover happens, but it requires a nut bolt or something to put in between so that I can do a failover. If they could integrate an automatic failover feature with software or hardware for when my production goes down, it would be a huge benefit. I will rate this solution a nine out of ten.