Quest Rapid Recovery [EOL] Reviews

It is for any kind of company that uses their own servers.

From a global perspective, our clients are small-sized companies. All the SMEs, compared to the Slovakian market, are quite small. It's a small market with small companies. They just want to enhance security and follow regulations.

It's the speed. Granular recovery, and also the possibility to connect all different Quest products together. So it works like Lego blocks.

Replication is good. The data protection strategy varies on a case-by-case basis, but overall, it's doing well. The customers who use Quest are still satisfied.

There is room for improvement in customer service and support. I would like to see faster response time. 

I would also like to see some discounts here in Slovakian market, Eastern Europe mainly. 

I have been dealing with Quest Rapid Recovery for around two years. 

The customer service and support are a little bit slow but understandable. They are capable, but sometimes they are overwhelmed, so it takes longer to get a response.

Neutral

I usually work with Quest or Macrium for recovery. When I work with companies with a small budget, I go with Macrium. If I see the budget and technical capacity needed, I will go with Quest.

The pricing is on the higher end. It's not for everyone, but for companies that can afford it, the value and the product match. It's not really for small companies without significant budgets, at least in our market.

It's a really good solution. I would recommend it. 

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I use Quest Rapid Recovery as a comprehensive solution for data backup, replication, and recovery across various IT environments.

Quest Rapid Recovery has improved our organization by making backups faster. In the past, using tape backups would take two to four days, but with Rapid Recovery, it is now completed within 24 hours, excluding the additional four-hour buffer.

The most valuable feature of Quest Rapid Recovery for our organization is the VM recovery functionality. Being able to take a snapshot and restore to another hardware or VM with just a five-minute downtime is crucial for us. Given the scale of our organization with thousands of VMs, this rapid VM recovery capability becomes a vital aspect of our workflow.

One area where Quest Rapid Recovery has room for improvement is in the handling of snapshots on Hyper-V. After the retention period, the snapshots on Hyper-V are automatically deleted, even though the integration is initially available. This creates a challenge for us, as we would like the snapshots to remain accessible on Hyper-V. In the next release of Quest Rapid Recovery, I would like to see enhanced traffic security features. Specifically, the ability to integrate with Active Directory would be valuable.

I have been working with Quest Rapid Recovery for five years.

The product is quite stable.

I would rate the scalability of the product as a nine out of ten. In my company, approximately 1,000 VMs and around 50 physical clients are currently using Quest Rapid Recovery. In terms of overall usage, the solution is active 24/7 to ensure continuous data protection and recovery capabilities for our systems. We plan to expand its usage.

Quest's technical support is usually good, but I currently have a case related to Rapid Recovery that has been ongoing for 10 to 15 days without a resolution. I would rate the support as a seven out of ten

Neutral

I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as an eight out of ten. 
During our initial setup of Quest Rapid Recovery, we encountered some smaller issues, mainly related to version compatibility and system changes. Setting up Quest Rapid Recovery was quick and done within a day. We started by ensuring the required prerequisites were in place. One server was dedicated to Rapid Recovery, and another acted as a proxy for communication. After installing the Rapid Recovery client on both servers and establishing communication, we configured settings and set up a backup schedule, deciding on file-level or full backups as needed. The process was straightforward, making the deployment efficient and completed within a day. One person with the right skills is all it takes for the deployment.

My advice to people who are considering implementing Rapid Recovery is that if you are using hypervisors, I strongly recommend it for backup. It is the best choice for effective data protection. Overall, I would rate the solution as a nine out of ten.

We have sold some of the products to our customers, mainly to remove competitors like Veeam and also other appliances that do not have the whole package integrated into just one appliance.

With the evolution of the product, I don't have to wait for a snapshot, a zero snapshot. It is more fully integrated with the hypervisor, particularly with VMware solution, and it is simple to create replica sets to our VR site.

The solution is fully integrated. I have three products in one: PowerEdge Server, the software, and the compression and deduplication features of the data domain integrated in just one solution.

The product is expensive. 

It is fine. It is in blocks of license and terabytes, so it's okay. If I start just with one appliance, the customer does not need to upgrade to another box or the storage solution.

The initial setup can be tricky, and if not done right, the whole solution needs to be reinstalled.

We use a third party to perform installation services.

Dell solutions are approximately 30% to 35% more expensive than Veeam.

We did evaluate Veeam Backup and Replication, Commvault, and Veritas.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use it to back up all of our data. The only servers that I do not have on here are my VoIP servers. I have a SQL database. I have an ERP server. I've also got a couple of file servers and a couple of domain controllers. I also back up my Hyper-V host machines. So, pretty much everything that we have is backed up here.

We are on the latest version, which is 660268.

It has reduced our admin time by approximately 95%. In the previous backup utility that we used, we were basically manually running a command every night to copy and paste anything that had a newer date than the previous day. On top of the fact that we had to manually launch that every night, we also had to make sure that we covered every drive that was going to be involved for that particular night's changes. Now, I can add servers and just plug them in there. Everything is already pre-configured, so I just add the machine.

Previously, we were using a tape backup. As our quantity of data expanded, when we would do the backup process at night, it was quite cumbersome, and very often, it would extend into the better part of the next day. If someone realized at 9:00 that there is a file that got corrupted or was deleted, they would notify me, and I would tell them that I will restore that, but I have to wait until the last night's job completes. After the job is complete, I had to go back and find the tape that had the copy of what they were looking for. Very often, that person would be waiting until the end of that day before they could resume whatever tasks they were trying to do, whereas now, it doesn't matter what's going on, on the Rapid Recovery side. My backups occur every hour, and it takes a snapshot. In a worst-case scenario, they may have to go back and repeat whatever they lost in that hour's time, but I can restore files for them almost immediately, and they can get right back to it. It has made a huge difference in that regard because previously, sometimes, they had to wait the entire day before I could get in and actually restore with the tape that had the data that they were missing.

It enables us to recover complete systems, applications, and data with little to no disruption to the work environment. I personally have not had to do that, but my counterpart has had to recover an entire server. He lost his exchange server at one point, and although, it did take him a couple of hours to get everything back up and running efficiently, he was able to back it up to the last good backup. Within an hour or two, he was able to get everything back up and running for users without a whole lot of data loss.

I use incremental backups daily. When I first bring a brand new machine, I take a base image, and then every subsequent backup going forward is incremental. The full base images are obviously redundant, and they fill up your repository quite quickly. Prior to adding additional storage, we didn't have a whole lot of wiggle room. We just didn't have the space to take another entire snapshot of the data. Incremental backups kind of do the dedupe and keep everything at the most efficient level of data so that you have everything you need, but you don't have a lot of fluff in there. You don't have extra copies of the same thing that you can grab from four different backup files. It is there, deduped. You just have your one pristine copy, which helps keep your storage really streamlined so that you're only using what you need versus a lot of excesses.

Incremental backups have reduced storage costs. We have roughly about 7 terabytes of storage, and while storage is not extremely expensive these days, it still adds up. So, if I were needing to have multiple copies of 7 terabytes at a time, it will cost you serious coin to have enough devices to hold that much in addition to buying licensing for that much. If all of your data sits in 7 terabytes, why would you want to pay licensing for 10 terabytes? That just doesn't make good business sense.

Incremental backups help to reduce the impact of our production environment or network resources. We replicate over the WAN. While we do have adequate bandwidth, if we were having to replicate base images consistently, it is obviously going to be pulling some of our resources for replication, whereas the incremental backups really replicate in a matter of minutes. We might have a couple of minutes here and a couple of minutes there when a replication job is happening, but they're pretty seamless. I don't know if anyone even notices. If we were replicating, it would be a consistent drain on our bandwidth until that huge file is replicated. So, incremental backups just keep everything running smoothly, quickly, and efficiently.

It affects the peace of mind when it comes to knowing our backups are completing. I do get an email if ever, for one reason or another, a job is not running. I typically reboot all of my servers over the weekend, and on one of my servers, when the agent did not start for any reason, I received an email that said that this job was missed because the agent is offline. So, I logged in and manually started it. There was no issue, and everything was up and running again. Similarly, my SQL backups will email me and tell me that the logs are truncated. No news is good news, but I know that if there is a blip of any sort, I'm going to get a notification email alerting me to take a look so that I can nip it in the bud right away. It is reassuring to have this communication.

It has been our experience quite often that files get deleted, but you do not notice that for a very long period of time. So, if something is deleted and no one caught it for six months, it's extremely important to know that you are going to be able to still recover that data.

We're kind of restructuring things, so we're not doing it currently, but we have another business that is owned by the same owners. They also use Rapid Recovery, but they are about four miles from here. We replicate. So, we have a copy on DL4000, and then we also have a copy on a SAN. We then replicate across the WAN to a core in their location, so we've got multiple copies. Primarily, we've started thinking about worst-case scenario disasters. Even though we have DL4000 and we have the raw data on a SAN, but in case a tornado goes through and wipes out our building, both copies would up in the clouds. So, we started doing replication across the WAN. Once you get the original configuration set up, it is pretty much set it and forget it. I do look at it every day and check for errors and the likes of that, but for the most part, it is pretty self-supporting. It doesn't require a whole lot of administration, which is really beneficial because you have enough other things going on throughout the day. You don't have to babysit it all the time.

It includes deduplication, replication, and virtual standby without having to pay extra. From a storage standpoint, the dedupe was important because we did not want to run into a situation where the data size was growing exponentially. In terms of replication, we wanted to be able to ensure that we had multiple copies in the event of a disaster. We wanted to make sure that we had a game plan for the worst-case scenario, and that it was something that we can trust and would fit the bill if we were facing that kind of scenario. We feel confident that it would do what it says it's going to do. We, fortunately, didn't have to rely on virtual standby. However, one of my counterparts in another sector of our business has used it, and it has worked out very well for him. Just seeing his experience and knowing that if we were facing a similar dilemma, it would work is immeasurable.

The local mount utility is most valuable. I do restores fairly regularly. Thankfully, I have not ever lost an entire server that I've had to resurrect, but I certainly have people who erroneously saved over a file or have deleted a file. So, we've done that quite a bit. We still have the DL4000 appliance, and we had, kind of, extrapolated that out over a five-year period. Now, we're in year six, so we had to add storage, which we did as a SAN next to DL4000, but prior to adding in that extra storage, we, here and there, would run into situations where for whatever reason, it would want to be pulling a new base image, and then we would run out of storage. So, we would utilize the archive feature and archive the old data that we want to hang on to, but we don't necessarily need it taking up current data storage. Being able to export out really old data is most valuable to us. Then, we just store that on a NAS that we keep in another building.

It is very easy to use. I've been using it for quite a long time. When we first got it set up, we had to do some tweaking because it was our first experience with a backup solution. So, we were just learning how it works and what to expect. We were understanding the whole process. Overall, if you know anything about backup solutions, I feel like this one is pretty self-explanatory.

I don't really think that there is a whole lot that needs to be changed. It would be nice if you could deploy the agent without having to reboot. When I upgraded my core to the latest version, I also wanted to update all of my servers, but I had to put that off because I can't just shoot it out there. I have to make sure it is at a time when I can do a reboot right away.

I do have one application that does not run on a server. It runs on a workstation that still is running Windows 7, and this new version does not have an agent for Windows 7. That would be something that would be helpful for me, but I totally understand why they're not doing that because, of course, Microsoft wants you to get off Windows 7. So, it can't necessarily be classified as an improvement,  but it would be helpful for me.

It has been about six and a half years.

I have not had any problems with it. It is pretty much a set-it-and-forget-it solution. I've not really ever felt as though I needed to constantly be checking on it to ensure that it was still running or that something was going to get stuck, and I was going to have a problem. It has been very stable for us.

Initially, we started out with DL4000. We have added onto that in the form of external storage because DL4000 itself really was not conducive to adding additional drives, but in all honesty, I feel like the ability to add external storage has actually opened up a lot of opportunities for us to change our environment.

We initially were licensed for an appliance, and just this last year, we converted our license to allow us to build a new core just on a new piece of hardware. Ultimately, because our DL4000 is six years old, we wanted to have a new core built so that in the event DL4000 starts to fail because it is a physical device, we could easily roll on to the new core that we're building. So, from a scalability standpoint, we added more storage, and now, we've converted our license so that we can build a new core, and subsequently, we can just have storage attached rather than all in one appliance.

It is just two of us who work with this solution. It is primarily me, but I do have a counterpart who is my backup. So, if I'm away or out of town, he can step in, take over, and check things. He can add or delete, whatever the case may be, but primarily, I run it. Obviously, he is always kept in the loop so that if something does come up, he is aware and knows what needs to be done, but primarily, it is my baby, and I take care of it.

I don't have any plans to increase usage, but the only reason for that is because I feel as though we are already using it to its full capacity within our organization. We have it backing up every single one of our servers. The only other thing that potentially could change would be if we would decide that we wanted to start backing up every client machine, but at this point, I don't believe that we would ever do that.

They provide the ability to chat with technical support, which is very convenient. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. Although I don't need to contact them often, when I do, most often, I get a fairly rapid reply. Typically, my issue or requirement is easily resolved.

We didn't use a similar solution previously. Before Rapid Recovery, we had a tape backup. We had a tape device, and we just copied and pasted changes daily, and it was very cumbersome. When Rapid Recovery came along, I was like, "Oh my God, where have you been all my life?"

To set it up initially, we had to do some tweaking. A lot of that was just understanding what we needed to do in order to accomplish what we were expecting, but once we got everything in place, it was actually quite easy. Now, I add new machines all the time. You just install the agent, set up your schedule, and you're good to go.

Its initial setup was pretty straightforward as I recall. I had the AppAssure crew for doing the setup. They were very astute at doing it. I just had to answer the questions, and they pretty much set it up. As I recall, I don't think there were any major blips or stumbling blocks that we had to deal with.

It probably took about a week on and off. We would set something up, and then we would test it for the evening and tweak it as needed the following day. So, it probably took three to four days.

In terms of the implementation strategy, the primary focus was obviously on the data. We put that on first and ensured that we've got a good clean backup of the drives that held the actual data files. From there, we moved on to backing up the server itself in terms of operating system partitions and that kind of thing.

We had the AppAssure crew. We purchased it from a company named AppAssure, and they had a technical support department that was for deployment. So, we incorporated that into our purchase.

My experience with them was great. They were very easy to work with. They were very approachable. If I did have a question, I got a prompt response back. I do recall that there was a gentleman with whom I worked, and he would research things for me and email me at whatever time I was running into an issue. I have no complaints at all. They were very good.

In terms of maintenance, I primarily take care of the maintenance. I ensure that I keep DL4000 up to date with driver updates, Windows updates, and those kinds of things, but I do that for all of my servers, so it is not really something extra or DL4000 specific. Other than that, as I do with all of my devices, I keep an eye on them to make sure that if any drive issues are starting to occur or whatever I'm aware of. Other than keeping the Windows updates and the machine drivers updates up to date, there really isn't a whole lot of maintenance that's required.

We don't have an official ROI, but the ability to recover data that had inadvertently been lost, deleted, or corrupted has been immeasurable. So, if we were to do something from a financial standpoint, I'm sure it would be a number that we would be quite happy with. We purchased it in 2015, and it is still going strong. So, it was a good investment for us. I feel like our company would stand behind it that it has paid for itself over and over.

In this last year, we added additional storage. The storage was separate, and it obviously didn't really have anything to do with Quest, but then we did have to purchase licensing to enable us to utilize that additional storage. I feel it was competitively priced in comparison to other backup solutions. It was reasonably priced for the ability for us to convert our licensing so that we were able to have the ability to build a core on our own and subsequently retire our appliance when the time comes. It was well worth the investment to do that because it afforded us a lot of future use without having to reinvest in a whole new solution.

When I purchased the change to the license, it was $1,600. I think that was for changing the license. I don't believe that I had to purchase technical support in a while, so I must've bought maybe for five years, but I don't feel there was a huge cost involved in technical support. Its cost was definitely worth it because we've had a fantastic experience with them.

We did look at some other products. It has been quite a few years, but there was another product that was probably very similar to Rapid Recovery in terms of the concept of how it works. We ultimately decided to go with the AppAssure product at that time primarily due to the vendor, and that was because it was marketed and being sold by Dell.

We are very heavily Dell-oriented in our environment. The majority of our equipment is Dell. We have a very good working relationship with them. So, if we were going to purchase something like this, it just made sense. We felt as though we would be in good hands given our previous experience and our relationship with Dell. I know that Quest has broken away from Dell, but from a customer standpoint, I do not feel as though there has been any degradation in their response or their service since they have broken away from Dell, at least not for me. Their service has been very consistent.

I would advise having a good and clear picture of what you want to achieve and accomplish. You should streamline the whole process. Their technical support people are very knowledgeable about their product. So, if you aren't prepared, they can definitely help you with the process.

I have done virtual machine tests at the very beginning, but the virtual machines at that point were very small. They weren't really loaded up with data, I just basically restored the virtual machine as just the OS, and those went very quickly. It has been several years.

I have not used Rapid Recovery to send updates to a virtual standby that can be activated if there is an issue with the primary machine. That's primarily because previous to purchasing more storage, we did not have the available storage to store them. We are doing some restructuring right now, and that is on the list of things that we will be doing.

I would give it a 10 out of 10. It has surpassed our expectations time and time again. I don't have any complaints about this solution. It has really been very stable. It has been a great tool for us.

We use Quest Rapid Recovery for disaster recovery of certain servers. This tool helps us restore live data. It also helps us with processes that can be from either a backup appliance or a backup disk.

It has helped our organization. In some cases, we feel that some data is missing from the disk. In such scenarios, we restore the HomeDesk with a set of time demands that are determined according to the application that you want to either restore or work with. You do not need to wait and can continue working.

The most valuable feature is the disaster recovery process from the data center.

I have not found any areas of improvement for the solution. In case, if there is anything, it would be the speed of the operation to be finished. Even then, I can easily work on the storing function before the operation is finished. However, there is a store operation almost any time but it can work either way so I find no problem there.

I have been working with this solution since 2017 and am still using it.

The solution is stable and solid.

The solution is scalable. It depends on the appliance backup disk. I use the DD 6300. Only two users from the admin side are using the tool.

We have previously used Veritas NetBackup and Quest NetVault.

The initial setup is not really easy. You don’t know about the software. You need to set up the software on the server. Then server-wise, you will define the repository desk where you are making the backups. After that, you need to define the client or the server client from which you need to take the backup from. Once complete, you can store it anytime.

You can use this to conduct a backup every week, every day, or every hour, and if there is any problem we can restore the fix on the server at any time according to the time lost.

The deployment did not take much time and can be completed almost in one hour.

We did the deployment through a department with the vendor. The partner was working on the deployment. We did not require lots of resources or staff members for the deployment.

I am not sure about the cost aspects since it comes with other software as a bundle.

I would rate this solution as a ten on ten. I recommend Quest Rapid Recovery as a must-have tool for rapid recovery. It is a safe solution to restore the backup operation. The maintenance of the solution is not difficult. You can say that ‘there is no need to troubleshoot’. 

The main pro of Quest Rapid Recovery is that you can do the restoration process anytime, store the data that lies on the disk, and work directly on the server. You will need to wait till the store process is completed. The con of the solution is that you need a big amount of disks to take the whole backup of your environment.

In terms of my use case for Quest Rapid Recovery, for one customer, I'm doing a case study, so there's a backup requirement for sixteen to twenty VMs and some physical machines, and there's a need to replicate that backup to the DR site. My company then uses Quest Rapid Recovery for backing up the VMs and replicating them on the websites, so whenever and wherever that is required, the VMs can be restored on the DR site.

One feature I found that's the most valuable in Quest Rapid Recovery is the VM standby feature which is very useful for my current customer. The solution also has a great replication feature. The third most valuable feature in Quest Rapid Recovery is the five-minute RPO and the fifteen-minute RTO. The solution is also very user-friendly.

In terms of what needs improvement in Quest Rapid Recovery, though the solution is seamless, right now, they are just giving the software which means we'll need to arrange the hardware. If they can combine the appliance and software, that would be a great approach.

In the next release of Quest Rapid Recovery, it would be great if they'd add a folder backup feature because only a snapshot backup feature is available at the moment.

I've been working with Quest Rapid Recovery for the last six or seven years.

Quest Rapid Recovery is a stable solution. It is very reliable.

Quest Rapid Recovery is a scalable solution, but it's not as scalable as NetVault.

The technical support for Quest Rapid Recovery is quite good. You just need to raise a ticket then within two hours, the support team will have a remote session with you and resolve your issues. On a scale of one to five, I would rate support a four.

The initial setup for Quest Rapid Recovery was straightforward. Deployment only takes thirty minutes if you do an OS patch, otherwise, it'll only take fifteen to twenty minutes maximum.

On a scale of one to five, with one being very complex and five being very easy, I'd give the initial setup of Quest Rapid Recovery a score of five.

We implement Quest Rapid Recovery for our customers in-house.

I'm not aware of the exact cost of Quest Rapid Recovery because I'm from the technical team, but in general, the solution is quite competitive cost-wise.

We evaluated Veeam and Nutanix against Quest Rapid Recovery. In terms of RPO, Quest Rapid Recovery has a five-minute RPO and that's a good point, while Veeam takes longer: fifteen minutes. Quest Rapid Recovery has VM standby as a native feature, while Veeam has replication on VMware. If you have VMware on both the DC and DR sides, you can replicate VMs from the Veeam console.

As for Nutanix, it has the native inbuilt plugin for Veeam that isn't present in Quest Rapid Recovery, but is in another Quest product: NetVault.

My company is a reseller and system integrator that sells backup solutions to customers, for example, Quest Rapid Recovery.

My company works on different releases of the solution, old and new, depending on the customer environment.

Quest Rapid Recovery doesn't require any maintenance unless there's a new patch release.

I would recommend Quest Rapid Recovery, but my recommendation would be on a case-by-case basis. The solution is most suitable for SMB customers, but it won't be suitable for all enterprise clients because it is not suitable for online databases such as SQL and Postgre, particularly because Quest Rapid Recovery has a snapshot-based backup. For databases, the vendor has a different solution called NetVault. If the client needs a physical machine backup, Quest Rapid Recovery is suitable, but if the client is using SQL or SAP HANA, then NetVault is the best tool.

What I'd recommend if you're looking into implementing Quest Rapid Recovery is to look at the feature list first and compare that against what you want and what's available in the solution.

My rating for Quest Rapid Recovery is nine out of ten.

We use Rapid Recovery to protect our core server applications, data, principal end-users who may have local information as well as information on the network.

The ease of use has reduced the admin time involved in our backup recovery operations. It hasn't reduced the daily monitoring of things, but it has reduced the managing of tapes daily and weekly by at least three hours of time a week.

Rapid Recovery really hasn't changed the way that we function. We were doing everything before that we do today. It's just that we do it with less effort now that we have Rapid Recovery, such as not having to handle the physical tapes and being able to do backups locally and have them replicated offsite. But it's less time.

It enables us to recover complete systems, applications, and data with little or no disruption to the work environment. That's very important. The amount of data that we generate in a day is very large and we can't afford to have a large, long protracted outage. So knowing and having our systems protected with Rapid Recovery allows us to return to a productive state quickly and rapidly so that we can continue our productions. We are a production facility and if our systems aren't working, we can't produce the product for our customers.

Using Rapid Recovery, we can have one of our servers, as long as it wasn't one of our big, crazy ones, up and going in and probably 30 minutes to an hour from a complete failure.

In the past, if we had to set up the server and then mount all the tapes and find all the tapes and all that, it could be an all-day or many-hour function, five to eight hours to get a server up and going, to one hour. It's just drastically changed our ability to get operations back up and running.

The ease of use is amazing and that's the most valuable aspect, being able to get the information quickly in the event of something failing or inadvertently being deleted.

We haven't had to rely on Rapid Recovery very often, but we had a core work product that had a server crash and we needed to restore the right database to get it operational again. It was very easy to walk through the different points in time of that database to get to the last known good one that was able to get us up and going within about 30 minutes of the failure being identified. So it was just really nice to go to the resource, find what we needed and restore each version until we got to them that worked.

Not having to switch tapes is wonderful. It makes it so easy. We have an on-prem deployment that we also replicate to an offsite replication host. So by not having to deal with tapes and moving them off-site every day and every week, that's amazing ease of use for us.

We use the synthetic incremental backups.

We also use it to send updates to a virtual standby that can be activated if there's an issue with the primary machine.

I think the self-paced learning and knowledge base can always be improved so that users can self-service without having to contact either a reseller or Quest. I know there are things that I would have been looking for to try and solve. And the only way I could get there was to actually open a ticket rather than go through self-service through the portal.

We have been using Rapid Recovery for about four years.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had any issues with it.

We're pretty small so we haven't scaled much beyond the on-site with an offsite replication.

There are two IT admin positions who use it and no end users. They monitor the server replication, licensing, and all of that, as well as add moves and changes if we deploy a new server or that isn't automatically covered through our VMware configuration or a new workstation that needs to have a physical license for itself as well.

In terms of the maintenance required, it's just software updates, or maintenance if a host goes offline and is no longer being backed up. It's kind of a check and balance but is that because the connection to that host is down, or is that because that host was decommissioned but nobody updated the Rapid Recovery system accordingly? 

We're updating our infrastructure, so we plan to move our Rapid Recovery and upgrade to the latest versions, but I think its depth and penetration within our infrastructure will probably remain the same.

Their technical support is very good. In the only handful of times that I've had to contact them in the past four years, they've been very responsive. Their knowledge of the product has been in-depth and they've been able to share the technical information and the solutions quite quickly.

We used to be a Veeam shop. We switched to Rapid Recovery on the recommendation of our technical partners. It just works. We've had different solutions throughout, Veeam, Symantec, and other traditional backup solutions, but Rapid Recovery really just works.

Backup Exec was just too cumbersome and their licensing was too complex. Veeam, we needed more features than we had in our initial Veeam licensing. And the main reason that we switched was on the recommendation of our technical partner after demonstrating the features and the affordability of the product.

The initial setup was straightforward. We pretty much just followed through with the wizards and the configuration. It was very easy to get the Rapid Recovery host up and going and then use the deployment wizard to deploy the agents out to the workstations that we were trying to protect, following the knowledge base articles of how to configure it with our VMware ESX environment was pretty straightforward as well.

For us to get everything fully deployed and everything actually protected it took a day or two. But out-of-the-box, we were up and running with Rapid Recovery, getting things done within about four hours.

Our strategy was to just get it done. The physical installation and then the actual software deployment, and we had a stair-step of which assets had to be up and running immediately. We wanted things to be protected immediately on the local server and then we needed to do the replication to the offsite server, but that was lower down in the process because we knew we were going to have to create the initial replication to an external drive and then move that to the offsite and import it into the offsite server before we could actually start live replication between onsite and offsite hosts.

Underground Vaults and Storage is our technical partner for our servers and infrastructure. They helped us greatly with our initial deployment setup and configuration, as well as planning.

We pay for our maintenance and we usually buy it for multiple years at a time. We like the fact that we were able to buy the VM licensing so that any of our virtual machines that are on the protected host are automatically covered under that license. Then all we need to do is add additional licenses for additional physical machines, such as workstations that we want to protect.

The maintenance is typically in addition to the standard license.

My advice would be that before you implement it, know your infrastructure, know what it is that you are planning on protecting and where it is, whether it's virtual or physical. That will have a drastic impact on how and the amount of time it takes to implement.

I sleep well at night knowing that our systems are protected. We have a very easy-to-use system and because it's easy to use, we regularly go and check in and do restorations to make sure that they are good.

Don't fear change. We weren't sure if we were going to like the product and move from our existing product, but by having a technical partner and not being afraid of change we reap the rewards of moving to a solid product.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We deploy it to all of our servers and we take all of the hard drive images and backups of the servers themselves.

Our primary use case is to replicate all our server data. We still may end up adding more licenses, but we've done our core file and print servers that we would really need that are crucial to the company.

We are actually in the process of purchasing VMware vCenter licenses. So, we have the paid version of VMware vCenter and we're going to be doing offline backups of the virtual machines themselves through VMware. We're going to use Quest as the data solution.

Our company survived a ransomware attack and the repository was not encrypted by the Conti ransomware strain.

It enables us to recover complete systems, applications, and data with little or no disruption to the work environment. Obviously, there's going to be some downtime on our domain when we're recovering an entire server, but we do use the features of doing the complete systems because all of our servers now are virtual machines, we're able to do complete restores of the virtual machine from Quest, which is important.

Quest's synthetic incremental backups are nice. The fact that it spreads it out a little bit and gives us more backups of the data itself is good. It allows us to go further back in time. I like the incremental backups because it doesn't take up as much space and it gives us a chance to go further back if we need to.

We have reduced the storage cost using synthetic incremental backups to a certain extent. The new server that we've set up for Quest, we extended the drives on it, so, it's allowed us to go a little bit further back. But our stuff's been mostly around eight to 10 terabytes and with incremental is about a month back.

It runs on its own separate server and it just runs in the background twice a day, noon and midnight. It works well and no one really notices.

We have peace of mind knowing that our stuff's being backed up and that there are no issues with it. Knowing that I can, from a protection standpoint, protect our users' data efficiently and can recover their data if need be from a month back, is very important.

Restoring a failed server from backup or failover to a virtual standby depends on the size, but if it's one of our bigger ones, would take anywhere from an hour to two or three hours. It just depends on how big of a server it is.

It's one of those things where we'll be temporarily down, but knowing that we're going to be back up in a pretty quick period once that restores complete is nice and helped us get back on our feet.

Definitely, the mount and recovery points are the most valuable, because if someone deletes a file or something, or if something gets corrupted, we can always revert back to an old change because our repository goes about a month back. The ability to roll back files and the ability to roll back servers is really important.

It is quite easy to use, especially once you do it a couple of times, then it's pretty pain-free. It takes a couple of minutes to do, obviously, it depends on the size of what you're doing. It's relatively quick and easy to use and most folks in our department could do it if they had to.

Quest is probably at the top of my list when it comes to ease of use compared to other solutions. I have nothing but good things to say about Quest. They've been great to work with. The software is easy to use. In my opinion, I've recommended Quest to several businesses that have reached out to me about recovery software.

The ease of use reduced the admin time involved in our backup or recovery operations. It's helped improve performance. I can recover a file in five to 10 minutes now, which is pretty impressive in my opinion.

Before, when my boss and I took over the IT roles for this company, they didn't really have any backups. They had old standard tapes that they'd have to roll back the tapes for and it wasn't guaranteed you'd be able to recover everything. Quest was pretty much the best option and we've kept rolling with it and it's been great.

It's not really Quest's fault, but the only issue that I had during the time when I was doing a lot of our restores is whenever the server reboots, it has to bring all of the repositories back in again, which takes around five to six hours to pull eight terabytes back in again. If a server reboots, the time to re-pull out the repository and recovery points back in does take a pretty long time.

They should try to boost performance when pulling in recovery points from server reboot. But really, that's not a big knock on them. As long as I can get the recovery points, that's all that we really care about.

We've had Quest Rapid Recovery for five to ten years now. 

I'm very pleased with the stability. I was able to recover stuff when the core server that it runs on was encrypted and I was able to still pull backups. I would say it's very, very stable and I trust it completely. I check it every day and verify the backups are coming in cleanly and it looks good.

It fits us exactly as a company, it meets all of our needs, the way that we use it just for doing backups. We do have three different facilities and that allows us to do data backups on all three of the virtual machine hosts.

Our company's around eight to 10 terabytes in terms of complete data. We have to make sure we have enough space for that. We do actually have a new Dell server coming here that we're going to work with the Quest folks to migrate the repository for. That's going to be around 25 terabytes. It'll allow us to go even further back. So, we're continuing to work with quest support to maintain that relationship and keep upgrading our company as we get bigger.

My IT director and I are involved in the maintenance every once in a while. I'm the core administrator of this software.

I would rate their technical support a 10 out of 10. They've always been super helpful for me. Throughout the ransomware process, they worked with me, we got everything updated that we needed to and got the backup state restored. Our company was back up and running within a couple of weeks. The only thing I had an issue with is sometimes, and I know it's because there are quite a few techs, but every once in a while, it's a little bit hard to get ahold of the tech that we were working with before. I still would maintain the 10 rating just because of the way that we were able to recover.

I haven't used a lot of other solutions. I've seen some demos of some other software, but I like the way that Quest formats their software and user interface. I like the options and availability for VMware that it has. I like how Quest has expanded its range from just data backups to being able to restore entire machines.

I was not involved in the initial deployment but the upgrading process was pretty easy overall. Obviously, the only down part about when you have to upgrade the clients is you have to reboot the virtual machines, which does cause a little bit of downtime. So, our company's in a 24/7 environment. We do have to reboot some of our servers when we deploy the new agent.

The time it takes to upgrade depends if there are Windows updates, unfortunately. If the Windows updates haven't been done in a little bit, it takes a little while. It can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. But typically it takes 10 to 15 minutes for a virtual machine to reboot.

Based on everything that's happened within the last few months, I'd say that we've easily gotten more than we've been paying for this, with how we were able to restore everything within a couple of weeks. We've easily gotten our money's worth out of Quest, whether that's individuals deleting files or recovering from an entire cyber attack on our company. It's been a huge lifesaver for us.

Coming from someone who's survived an attack, I would say that the pricing is fair when you think about what could happen and the price of what would happen if your stuff wasn't backed up. I would say pricing is whatever you're willing to risk for your data and we're not really willing to take that risk and we're willing to invest in good backup software. That's pretty much how you defeat any virus or any ransomware attack.

If you want a good solution to keep your data safe and secure, Quest would be a solid choice. And in terms of the reliability of your backups, you'll be able to restore your company very quickly with the backups as well. There's always room for expansion with it too, which is nice.

Having a couple of individuals within your company that know the software pretty well and are trained on it well is a helpful improvement on restoring your data as well. It'll help boost the process along.

I would give it an absolute 10 out of 10 because of everything that we've been through, the learning lessons that we've been through, and now it's given us a chance to look at the bigger picture and say, "Well, what more can we do to protect ourselves so this doesn't happen again?" With Quest and VMware together where we're putting together some good solutions for the future.

It is basically used for everything. It is used all the way from files recovery on a simple basis, where one user accidentally deletes a file and we need to replace it, to a server crash, where we need to bring it up virtually on another unit because the hardware crashed or something like that.

It is deployed on-prem. We have two units with Rapid Recovery. So, we have two DL1300s. It was sold as an appliance package at the time.

Previously, in order to do a restore on a file, you had to go through and find the file on a tape or whatever your medium is. You had to go through and dig until you found it, which used to take forever, whereas now, you can mount the whole server in a few minutes, and you can go down and dig into the file you're looking for. If it is not in that directory, all your other directories are available. Doing it this way saves you a lot of time versus the old way, where you find that one file and restore it. If that doesn't turn out to be the file that the user wanted, you got to go back and do it all over again for the other file that they have guessed as being the one. It saves you a lot of time because you're mounting the whole server to a point in time, and then you can grab any file from that point in time and then give it to the user. You can copy/paste it or use some other preferred way. So, it is very easy to use, and it saves hours on each restore.

We spin up all of our machines as virtual machines. They have a feature called virtual standby that allows you to keep all of your virtual machines in a state where they're basically standby virtual machines. All you have to do is spin them up, and then that machine is up and running. So, we test that functionality quarterly to make sure that it is working. We need to know the backups are working. Otherwise, we get alerts if they're not working. The backups go between every hour, every four hours, and every 24 hours. In terms of doing recovery, once every couple of months, we have to recover a file or do something similar. This virtual standby feature would save us quite a bit of time if we have to recover specific servers that have crashed and bring them up with Rapid Recovery. It would save us approximately four to eight hours.

Probably the point-in-time recovery is most valuable. The other piece that is really nice is that you can mount a whole server at any point in time. So, you can mount the server with all the drives to a Z drive or something like that. It will just mount it all up, and your data is accessible right there on one drive, which is nice.

It is very easy to use when it comes to recovery. It has got a couple of buttons. You click restore, and then you click the machine that you want to restore. You can mount a point-in-time recovery of that server if you're just looking for a file, or you can just restore the whole server. It is very intuitive.

For the most part, it is really good in terms of flexibility and choice of recovery methods. What we found lacking was being able to back up virtual volumes that are clustered. We ran out of luck there. There should be an option for backing up clustered virtual volumes.

I have been using this solution for six years.

It has been great and spot-on. I haven't had any issues with it yet.

It is pretty scalable. If you want to increase the amount of space you need, you can just add some licensing. It is pretty straightforward. It seems pretty scalable to me.

In terms of users, it is pretty much just me, so it is just the Systems and Network Administrator.

In terms of usage, we probably use it 70%. We restore once every couple of months if somebody needs something, but that's about it. I don't see that changing. Its usage will remain the same. We may just need more disk space.

I have used their Premier Support. They get back to us pretty quickly. They usually have somebody knowledgeable who is able to help us resolve a situation pretty quickly. 

Their Premier Support costs money. I am not sure if it is worth your money if you have to call and get help with the product just a few times a year. I don't really see too much of a difference between their regular support and Premier Support. They seem similar. Their Premier Support hasn't been an influence in purchasing additional licenses or products.

We've used a few in the past. We used Symantec Backup and probably Unitrends. We have also used eFolder. We switched primarily because of the cost and technology. Quest offered some options. Their bare metal recovery was a little easier to do, and spinning up the virtual machines was pretty intuitive. You didn't need extra software to do it.

It was pretty straightforward. The software is pretty intuitive, and you can do agent or agent-less installs. If you have a physical virtual machine, such as a physical VMware hypervisor, you can back up all the machines on that hypervisor, or you can install agents. With the agents, you can get a little bit more granular with the reporting information. So, it is pretty easy, no matter which way you want to go.

The deployment duration depends on the method you choose. If you're doing it agent-less, it can take as little as a few minutes. With an agent, it would probably take 15 to 20 minutes per server because you usually have to install the software, and then you have to reboot. So, it includes the reboot time.

Our implementation strategy was to back up all machines and then synchronize the two units with each other. We have an onsite unit and an offsite unit, and they back each other up. So, we had to back up all machines and then synchronize the two units so that they back each other up, and the offsites are stored at each other's location.

We implemented it ourselves. In terms of maintenance, we upgrade it very often. It is currently on the latest version. So, anytime a new version of the software comes out, I'll upgrade it on each server, and then, of course, you want to test the backups as well. 

It is really hard to quantify. We've done some tests, but they don't give you any ROI. I don't know of any backup solution that has ROI in terms of saving money to the bottom line unless somebody had a major disaster from which they've had to recover. Even in that case, you're not really quantifying your ROI because you still have to spend money on that backup solution. That's really hard and a tricky one.

If there was a situation where we needed to use it, it would save money and recovery costs, but as a whole, I don't believe it has saved us any money. It is like an insurance policy. We wouldn't consider living without such a solution. We have to have some kind of backup system. It doesn't have to be this specific product. There are other products that will do the same.

I believe the basic license comes with six terabytes, whereas a lot of the other ones are four terabytes. From the price point, it seemed a lot better than the comparative models, such as Datto, Barracuda, and some of the others. I believe Barracuda was about $15,000 for four terabytes, and Quest was around $12,000 for six terabytes.

Pricing is based on the period. There is just the maintenance fee that you have to pay annually, or you can pay for a three-year or four-year contract. This includes Premier Support.

My advice would be to always test your backups. It doesn't matter which product you're using. You need to test them.

In terms of the recovery at the attribute level, as long as you have the decryption key, you could mount the server, and then you can grab whichever file you need. We back up the whole server, so technically, we could just do a restore. We could just mount that server and grab the files that we need and that were a part of that active directory piece, or we could just restore the whole server at a point in time. I've never had to do it. We've done tons of restores and file restores, but I've never had to restore an active directory. I would rate this feature a three out of 10 because we never had to do it. Of course, when you do need to do it, it is probably a 10 out of 10, but it gets really messy when you try to restore some of that stuff, so we've tried to avoid that at all possible costs.

It claims to provide Microsoft compliant bare-metal recovery and active directory data restore, but I never had to do it. I have spun up virtual machines. We spin them up all the time. It is basically a server at a certain point in time, and then you bring it up on the virtual machine as a virtual machine, and it pops right out. Nowadays, pretty much everything is a virtual machine. So, I don't see why you'd ever need to do a full restore or bare-metal restore when you can just spin up the virtual machine at any point in time. If you need specific files off it, you could do that, or you could just use that virtual machine and just read it back to that point in time and then restore the files you need.

We use its malware detection, but we also use other pieces. We use Comodo for antivirus and malware protection, and we also use Microsoft, so we are kind of double protected. Its malware detection capability is important, but it comes at that point where it is too late, which means that something has already pretty much gotten past your antivirus, your Defender, and everything else. If you go to restore a machine that has been affected with ransomware, by then, it has already got past your malware detection, your antivirus, and all those things. So, you're pretty much toast at that point anyway. It isn't easy to recover from that unless there are definitions, and then you need to restore the machine with the new definitions, grab the files, and move them to the new server.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. It is a pretty intuitive and straightforward product. It does a pretty good job overall, and it does quite a bit, but there is definitely room for improvement in terms of backing up clustered virtual volumes.

Our primary use is backup and restore, which we use to protect our customers' data centers.

From an operations standpoint, the email notifications have helped me a lot.

The mount function has helped us because it is a straightforward process that we can explain to a customer over the phone. When they need to restore a file or a folder, there are only a few steps involved.

Many times, we have been able to recover data with little disruption to our customer's work environment. In a few cases, it helped me to recover all of the data for a customer, which was a big help.

In cases where we have had to restore a failed server, the process has been quite fast. The timeframe depends on the size of the data but it is faster than other products we have worked with.

There are multiple choices for restoring data. For example, first, you can create a virtual standby, and then restore data while it is being used. Alternatively, you can bring up another server and then restore data to it. I have not yet used virtual standby in production.

The most valuable feature is the ability to mount a backup as a drive, where you can access the data.

Quest Rapid Recovery has good speed and reliability.

Rapid Recovery has a feature that will archive backups.

This product is straightforward and easy to use.

I'm quite impressed with the usability, and I am comparing this with other backup and data protection software that I have used, such as NetVault. Rapid Recovery is easier to use because of its user-friendly interface.

An example of another product that I use currently, that is different from Quest products, is Veeam. I prefer to use Rapid Recovery because the number of steps required in the process is minimal. With fewer steps required to complete my tasks, compared to other products, Rapid Recovery is the easiest one to use.

This product has absolutely reduced the admin time involved in my backup and recovery operations. The amount of time it saves depends on each customer's environment. At the most basic level, before using this product, I had to log in every day to check on the stability of the backup and sometimes act based upon it. For example, if there was a failed backup then I had to set a new one.

With Rapid Recovery, after creating alerts, I no longer need to check on each client. I used to have to go to each client, one by one, and check several pages to see whether a backup had failed. Now, I simply wait for an email notification to inform me of the status. Basically, half of my day is saved because of the email notification and alerts. When I don't receive an alert then I don't even need to check.

The compression and deduplication features have helped to save on storage costs. We have quite a number of clients, and there is a lot of data. I am quite impressed because we started with an 18 TB capacity license, and we managed to back up almost 126 clients. This was possible because of the deduplication and compression features. There are other solutions that only support compression, and they require that customers allocate more storage. For example, my customers that are using NetVault require more capacity.

Incremental Backup is another feature that saves storage space because this type of backup only records the changes since the last one. If there are few changes then it does not affect the storage very much.

I really like the replication features. Rapid Recovery has different mounting options and you can do a fast restoration. For example, you can mount a virtual hard disk and it doesn't impact your environment. My customers have been quite impressed with the speed of replication.

One of the features that I like is the Rapid Recovery Core portal. Basically, you can access the customer's site using a website URL. However, what I notice is that the information sometimes differs from what is in the Rapid Recovery Core. I think that more should be done to ensure that this is synchronized.

When backing up the configuration it has to be done manually, which is something that should be improved. It is quite surprising to me that the configuration cannot be backed up automatically, and I think that Rapid Recovery should have an option for scheduled configuration backup.

I had an experience with one customer where the backup storage was corrupted, and as a result, the repository was corrupt. In that situation, with the repo gone, we were unable to retrieve the backup. To handle situations like this, it would be great if Rapid Recovery offered a second-tier of backup. What I am doing now is archiving the repository, which gives me a secondary backup for my clients.

I have been working with Quest Rapid Recovery for almost three years, since 2019. I began working with it as soon as I joined my current company.

I would rate the stability at 95%.

This product is quite scalable. I'm quite impressed with the way Rapid Recovery handles scale and the ability to expand it. As our customers migrate from NetVaule to Rapid Recovery, we increase our own total storage space and it's easy to do.

In the first two years, we subscribed to 13 TB of data. Now in our third year, it has been increased to 18 TB. Because the product is profitable and working well, the company is planning to increase usage. Eventually, all of the servers will be put into Rapid Recovery and additional licensing will be purchased.

In our environment, there are two administrators for this solution. One handles the customers and the other is internal. Between them, we have full visibility.

Technical support is quite fast. My interactions with them are quick because I have memorized the steps, which start with sending them the logs. Once I send the log to support, they can begin.

Overall, they are quite fast and quite helpful.

I use a variety of Quest products, including NetVault. Based on my observations, when a customer allocates 50 TB with NetVault, you can do the same with less storage using Rapid Recovery. It only requires about 20 TB to restore 120 clients, which results in a lower overall storage cost.

Many of my customers began with NetVault, and we proposed Rapid Recovery to them. In general, they have been quite happy with the switch. They like the way it connects with the core and that they do not have to install agents. One of the problems with installing an agent is that you often have to reboot that machine, and they no longer have to do this.

Most of the servers are migrating to Rapid Recovery because they trust it. From a maintenance perspective, the majority of the issues that I had found previously were related to agents. After migrating, these problems are no longer there.

Performing maintenance on Rapid Recovery involves more steps than it does with NetVault, although not very many. I just want to ensure that everything with Rapid Recovery is stable.

I also use products from other vendors including Veeam.

Both installing and upgrading are simple and straightforward to do. It is not a complex process to set it up. The complete deployment takes less than 15 minutes.

Based on the customers that I have now, my implementation strategy focuses on VMware. VMware connects to Rapid Recovery using vCenter. It is set up so that customers retain their data for one month.

Because Rapid Recovery doesn't have a secondary backup, I also have the archiving solution as part of this. 

We have an in-house team for deployment.

Minimal staff is needed for deployment and maintenance.

Licensing fees are based on the amount of data that you want to store, which is related to how many customers you want to cover. I recommend that before purchasing a license, you identify how many clients will be protected. You then need to estimate the total amount of storage based on each client's size.

Evaluation of other options is the responsibility of the customer. My company handles multiple data products but this is the only option we offer for data recovery.

The Synthetic Incremental Backup feature is a new one that I haven't set up yet. Instead, I use the normal incremental backup.

When replication is being used, when it first starts, it will be slow. The reason for this is that you have to start with a base. Then, once you have the base, the replication is very fast.

It is important to my clients that features such as deduplication and replication are included at no extra charge. They understand these features, as well as compression, and understand the costs involved. As they switch from other products, they know that implementing Rapid Recovery and adding storage will not cost very much.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is to not trust the storage hardware. Similarly, don't trust the connection between your customer and the backup storage site. When corruption occurs then it is quite troublesome and requires a lot of troubleshooting. Moreover, some data may be lost permanently. To deal with this, we have started creating multiple repositories and back up accordingly. This gives us insurance that data is not lost in the event of a disaster.

My advice for anybody who is looking into this product is to first know what they have in their environment. For example, if they are using a tape backup system then this product is not applicable. However, if they have a supported storage system then this is a good choice. Similarly, if replication is being used at branch offices then this product is very good because of the speed. I really like how the replication capability works.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.