NAKIVO Backup & Replication Reviews

I use it for my VM (Virtual Machine) backups. I logged into it, created myself an account, and then I created my backup jobs. Then I can run the jobs to do the backups when I want. I can schedule it to run when it is convenient — say at 10 o'clock at night — or I can say run it right now, or whatever. It is pretty intuitive in that sense. Pretty easy to set up and use.  

What I like most about it is their solution runs either on Windows or Linux or even on something like Synology. Nakivo is versatile and able to work with other systems.  

The lack of that capability is one of the big reasons that I do not like Veeam. Veeam is strictly a Windows solution. That is a big negative in my opinion. Plus Veeam is good — it is not that it is not good, it works great — but it is also expensive.  

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 have been using Nakivo for a couple of years on-and-off.  

The stability and performance can depend on how many VMs you have and the volume of what you are backing up. I think I set it up for one customer in their lab and they had 50 or 60 VMs running and set it up to kickoff at say at 10 o'clock at night and do the backup. Nakivo just does its thing on schedule. Here when I back it up, when I back up my Atlassian tools, I will back up three of those VMs at one time. 

So it is pretty stable when it comes to carrying out what it is supposed to do. Again, it depends on how fast your network is, how many transporters you have, and where you are backing it up to. Although I do not do it myself, Nakivo has the capability to back up directly to Amazon S3 if you choose to do that. The flexibility for working in various environments is really valuable, and in my case it saves money.  

I think the scalability of the product is good. All you have to do is basically just install more transporters. If you only got one transporter installed and you are trying to back up 100 VMs at the same time, you are pushing everything through one little teeny pipe, but if you have more transporters, then it will actually use all of those and the backups and restores can happen faster.  

I have not really used technical support because I have not had any issues or problems with the product. It is very easy to set up and very straightforward to use. I can not vouch for that fact on Windows because I have never tried it on Windows. I choose not to do that. I run everything on Linux and I like that better.  

I have used other solutions and I wound up sticking with Nakivo because it is more versatile and it is able to work with systems other than Microsoft. You can get it running in many different ways. I am just running the previous build VM, but I also have a 12 terabytes Synology NAS unit here. I can actually install it directly on that and not even have to create a virtual machine. It runs great without any extra setup. So I am using Nakivo for versatility, mostly.  

The initial setup and installation are very straightforward. It depends on how many transporters you want to install. You can install more than one transporter. If you are doing lots of backups, multiple transporters will make it go faster. In my case, I do not need that. I have actually tried using multiple transporters at customer sites and it is a functional solution.  

I just use the free version — if you will — it is kind of free. You can buy a one-time perpetual license, or you can do subscription-based leasing, or you can do it based on how many VMs you want to back up. If you want to only buy it for 50 VMs, then you only buy it for 50 VMs. You have a lot of different options when it comes to pricing and the pricing models are pretty flexible and affordable.  

I have tried Veeam and I have tried a few others. I forget their names. Nakivo just seems simpler to me. It is simple to use. I like the fact that I do not have to have a Windows license to run it like I would with other products like Veeam. That is just another something that I have to pay for and maintain on top of what I already have. Nakivo is a work-around for that situation.  

I like the product because it is doing exactly what I need it to do, and that is reliably backing up my VM. I have actually had to restore some VMs. Sometimes the power just goes off here and something will get corrupted and it works well for that. It has been reliable in restoring exactly what I needed to restore.  

Based on my experience, the advice I would give to people considering it is to go for it. I think it is a great product. But there is a problem with customers — especially government customers — resisting adopting anything new. They get hung up on one thing and they like to stick with it. They buy a license and they just have it set in their minds that they do not want to try anything else, even though the solution they have might be costing them a fortune. Getting them to adopt a change can be difficult.  

It is like when someone is committed to Cisco. I tell government customers not to buy Cisco under any circumstances. I tell them just to never get involved with it. Then they will complain and say that Cisco is all that they know. Arista beats the hell out of Cisco and it uses the same interface. Guys who know how to use Cisco already will not have to go to school at all to learn how to use Arista, and it ends up being half the price. My complaint about Cisco is not that it does not work. It depends on what you are doing. But in my opinion, Cisco solutions just do not have the necessary throughput for certain situations.  

I have tried to get a lot of clients to buy this and show them the advantages. Some of them just say they already have a license for something else and they want to stick with it. People need to be open to the advantages of considering other products and how that can make a change in their efficiency and their bottom line.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Nakivo as a nine-out-of-ten. I would never give anything a ten.  

Our customers moved to VMs on VMWare and Hyper-V and due to this, a new backup solution was needed. 

I have tested most of the brands on the market and looked at Nakivo. From the start, this was an easy-to-use no-nonsense tool that just worked. The price was low, and it was flexible to install, both on Windows servers and as a Linux VM.

Recently I have started to use the Linux appliance from Nakivo and they work great. I like the idea of having the backup software on a different platform disconnected from the production system.

The management of NAKIVO works great. They make it simple to get an overview of the status, backup progress, and the used disk space in the repository.

It is very useful for all types of backup and a copy function to external media works smoothly.

It is the first time I have been able to set up backup systems that work and is easy for the customer to access and check the status of the system.

It can be used on many systems, like VMs, physical machines, and Office 365, from the same installation - depending on the license.

The easy management and a good overview are the most important aspects.

The compression function optimizes the use of disk space and the error reporting that sends emails if anything goes wrong.

And the great service from the support, I have never experienced that they couldn’t help and if I forgot to answer, then they reminded me, to keep tracking the error until it was solved.

Since I have started to use NAKIVO backup I have not got a complaint from my customers about the backup system.

It is easy to create new users by giving the customer access to the management system and they do not have to install anything.

Right now, nothing is wrong.

The product fits my needs 100%. I use it for the backup of VMs. Some customers only have two VMs and others have more than 30.

The only thing I can think of is better options for adjusting the text in the mails that the system sends, both for reporting and for errors. When you review these emails from different customers, then it can be hard to identify from what system they have been sent.

The process for getting unused diskspace back from the data repository is slow. This could need an update to improve the speed.

I've used the solution for five years.

The system is very stable. Most problems have been from other systems.

The scalability is really good.

They offer super professional technical service.

Positive

We used Symantec Backup Exec and tried Veeam.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The setup is easy and they have really good guides. The price is also good, specialy for systems with many VMs.

We looked into Veeam, Symantec, and some other backup systems for host systems.

We have used the solution for backup and restoration in a vSphere Environment. Nakivo can be used to backup nearly any virtual infrastructure. For us, it keeps incremental and full backups in a repo with deduplication that will keep storage usage low and restores very quickly. It integrates well with NFS storage for larger storage needs. There is also a monitoring dashboard that we use to monitor our virtual hosts. We use the fast restore option to quickly spin up virtual guests when there is no time to copy it back to the virtual host datastore.

Nakivo has been great for incremental backups of our virtual infrastructure. Restoring from backups is very simple. Nakivo, similar to Veeam Backup gives you peace of mind and confidence in your virtual infrastructure. 

If you were to lose a virtual host or a local datastore or remote datastore, Nakivo quick restore allows you to immediately spin up the virtual guest from backup on another virtual host, eliminating downtime and allowing for quick migrations to new hardware in the case of a catastrophe.  

The following aspects are the most valuable:

Quick Backups. Nakivo backups operate quickly, generally around 50 to 100MB/s, depending on your environment. This speed combined with only incremental changes being uploaded allows for quick hourly or nightly backups that don't bog down your infrastructure and take resources away from other needs.

Lightning-quick restores. Restores can run directly from the Nakivo Repo. You don't need to transfer back to the datastore until you have the time to do so.

Low Price. The price is much lower than competitors that do the same function.  

Support. Support has been friendly and responsive.

It would be great if they had a Let's Encrypt integration. Since LE provides free SSL certificates, it would be great. 

If you already have an internal CA authority you likely wouldn't need this, however, LE integration would allow shops without an internal CA to easily and freely (at no cost) auto-renew SSL certs. As it currently stands, you need to process your SSL renewal on another machine and then import it into Nakivo. It would be nice if Nakivo integrated LE and supported both HTTPS and DNS Validation for those machines behind Firewalls.

I have used the solution for three years.

The stability has been consistent.

The solution scales well.

Technical support offers fast knowledgeable response.

Positive

We tested Veeam, however, the price didn't seem worth it. Nakivo performs the same functions for a better price.

We used the Virtual Appliance for an easy setup experience.

I'd advise new users to reach out to CS at Nakivo and they will be happy to work with you on a quote that fits your needs. They got back to us quickly.

We did evaluate Veeam.

We are using Nakivo for our primary backup, replication, and recovery for our environment. 

We create bare metal recovery backups for if/when we have a server that goes down. We also back up all of our databases, servers, and log files for Microsoft. We use Nakivo at multiple locations for all our backups, replications, and recovery. We back up locations to other locations so we have an off-site disaster recovery plan in place. We are currently using an Essentials Pro license and are doing an on-premise solution.

Nakivo has drastically improved our organization. We needed to minimize the impact of ransomware incidents on our business continuity and ensure that our data was easily recoverable. Nakivo backup, recovery, and replication have made that possible and easy. The product is easy to manage for any IT person who is new to backup, recovery, and replication. The product is also easy to implement whether you are doing on-premise or cloud. Reporting tool has been nice for getting email updates on backup jobs and any kind of failures. 

One of the most valuable features of Nakivo that we have been using for the last six years is the whole system backup. It works the best out of so many different applications we have looked into, without a doubt. 

The ease of use website, reliability, email notifications if the job is successful or unsuccessful, and performance have all been top-notch for us. 

It uses all the bandwidth available, if not limited, and backs up entire servers with all data faster than a lot of other backup software out there. 

As far as features, there really is not anything we need right now. 

The only thing I could say is maybe some more options for job scheduling are needed. As of right now, we can only schedule incremental and full backups. However, there are no differential backup features in the same job. 

The speed to do backups now is okay, yet if there was a way to increase the speed at encrypting or compressing would be nice. And, of course, if Nakivo just keeps updating its product, then we are happy. 

I've used the solution for six years.

The system is very stable. Most problems have been from other systems.

The scalability is really good.

From support to account management, there is always someone available to help with either renewals or support of the product. I have had to reach out to support a couple of times for issues or help, and there has been someone available immediately and able to help me quickly.

Positive

We switched products since we needed something easier to manage and set up and something more reliable. Nakivo has been all that for us.

The setup was straightforward, and support was there every step of the way. 

We implemented the setup in-house with Nakivo support who was very helpful every step of the way.

The software is well-balanced with respect to the features it offers. It has easily solved our problems. It has amortized by one hundred percent.

When we were looking into different solutions, the overall cost at the time was very attractive. Nakivo can be installed on Qnap NAS - which is more price friendly.

We evaluated Barracuda and Veeam.

The product is easy to manage for any IT person who is new to backup. The product is also easy to implement whether you are doing on-premise or cloud. The support team is always helpful and responds quickly.

As a software house, we make heavy use of the VMware vSphere environment for hosting our test lab along with the software repositories and other data.

There are some software repositories, file shares, and a VMware vSphere environment with about 60 virtual machines (few transient but the majority evolving), all weighing in at around 3.4 TB of data to backup.

Our data is mostly NAS-centric so we need a comprehensive solution to back up our NAS, possibly without allocating an additional instance of operating system and related hardware.

It is also necessary to make local and offsite backup copies of our data without recurring, if possible, scripting.

Nakivo permits easy installation natively on a NAS and has a low-impact footprint for needed resources. It can be quickly configured via web pages.

It is strongly oriented to backup VMware vSphere environments yet permits us also to protect data based on CIFS (Microsoft SMB) shares, thus covering our needs.

We can protect our environment by backing up data to local, offsite, and Amazon storage - making use of backup and copy jobs offered natively by Nakivo.

After an initial configuration and calibration work, the software now works successfully.

It can be installed natively on NAS appliances (it supports Qnap and other kinds of NAS) permitting the use of underutilized appliances without installing the software on Windows or Linux Servers.

The solution has frugal resource needs.

We can backup natively our VMware Virtual Machines and File Shares.

We can store backups (or make copies of them) onto Microsoft shares, Amazon S3, (which is ultimately on more economical Backblaze), and remotely to other sites using their little transporter VM.

Jobs can be chained one after the other to not overload the system with overlapping jobs or to start a backup copy job after its relative backup has ended.

We have rapid add/remove/reorder priority of VM to backup and their backup archive.

Nakivo Service is very helpful and pretty fast to respond (about 1-2 days).

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).

I've been using the solution for more than four months.

Previously we use MicroFocus VM Explorer (formerly Trilead VM Explorer).

Upgrading the vSphere platform makes VM Explorer no more able to support new environments. Further, we need a more comprehensive backup solution.

The setup of the software is simple and rapid.

The price is reasonable for our needs and with respect to the features offered.

We looked at Acronis Cyber Protect and Altaro VM Backup.

Our primary application of Nakivo centers on backing up our comprehensive VMware environment. 

Operating within a VMware server, it serves as an integral component of our data protection strategy. This setup is crucial as it continuously safeguards our virtual machines, ensuring no data loss during critical workflows or unforeseen system downtimes. 

By utilizing Nakivo in this specific context, we can efficiently replicate and recover our vital data stores, providing a reliable safety net for operations. 

This reliability not only streamlines administrative tasks but also fortifies our approach to risk management, focusing on proactive measures and strategic resource allocation within our IT environment.

Nakivo has been instrumental in strengthening our data security infrastructure. By allowing the creation of cold stand-bys, it ensures immediate availability of recent backup data, minimizing potential downtime. This proactive measure is crucial for maintaining our operational resilience, ensuring consistent business continuity, and safeguarding client trust. 

The automation of these processes has also enhanced efficiency, freeing our team to focus on strategic tasks rather than routine backup management.

Nakivo's robust support for VMware, including both ESXi and vCenter, is invaluable, ensuring seamless integration with our virtual systems. 

The flexibility in setting up multiple repositories is crucial for diversified storage, enhancing data safety. 

Moreover, Nakivo's outstanding customer service is a standout feature, providing swift, effective solutions, which is critical to maintaining operational continuity and confidence in our data protection strategy. 

This comprehensive approach reinforces our disaster readiness and overall system 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.

I've used the solution for more than a year.

We did not previously use a different solution.

We also evaluated Veeam.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a cost-effective solution without compromising on features and functionality. I selected NAKIVO Backup & Replication to benefit from its cost-effectiveness, user-friendly interface, versatile platform support, performance optimization, advanced features, and storage efficiency. 

The setup process is very quick and I am able to install it on a Windows machine in less than five minutes. The app for a QNAP NAS system has proven to be very useful, quick to deploy, and reliable.

I found Nakivo valuable for the following aspects: 

• ease of use
• quick to deploy
• great value for pricing 
• professional and quick support

The VM Backup Verification is one of the features I appreciate the most. Other than that, the possibility to have remote (off-site) repositories has been a feature we really love, since it helps us to provide our customers with remote backups, storing the data with encryption and deduplication to allow safe and reduced storage usage. 

The notification process helps us to be aware of each backup result.

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. 

I've been using the product for seven years.

We use Nakivo Backup and Replication to protect our critical data from virtual and physical machines. It is also very important to control the correctness of backups, which allows us to recover data after a failure. 

We also use the Wasabi cloud copy function. We replicate copies to the offline environment. 

We also secure our SQL servers by using the ability to run scripts before and after the backup. We use developed and implemented backup policies and schedules. 

We leverage the possibility of making a copy of Microsoft 365

The implementation of Nakivo made it possible to implement the information security policies currently in force in the company and to meet the statutory requirements in the field of IT security. 

The possibility of implementing extensive security policies and the developed schedules allowed for the reduction of costs related to ensuring information security. 

We also solved and deployed anti-ransomware using Nakivo. We monitor our virtual environment, CPU, RAM, and disk usage across VMware infrastructure including hosts, virtual machines, and data warehouses. This allows real-time data analysis directly from the solution interface.

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.

I have been using Nakivo Backup and Replication for eight years.