Quorum OnQ Reviews

We launched all of our advocacy departments through Quorum next month. We are in the process of uploading all of our data and creating custom fields.

We are moving to the Quorum platform fully. Phone to Action is dissolving. We are in a training environment that can transition seamlessly to a live environment.

Quorum provides an elevated ability to filter on everything from people's location to age to their voting history. This is an extreme feature that will help our advocacy department a lot. It encompasses the ability to formulate emails and calls to action across regions. Their platform is more advanced than our previous one. It provides a smooth training experience and easy terminology for those in the advocacy world.

They have radio buttons that allow multiselection, which is not intuitive. Also, the URL for our environments is the same, making it confusing for management when handling different departments with different needs.

We have been using Quorum OnQ for four months.

We have not experienced any stability issues so far. Knock on wood.

Their support team is good. We haven't had to solely use them in an emergency. So far, it's good.

We used Phone to Action before Quorum acquired it. We switched as Phone2Action is going to dissolve.

It's a little expensive. That said, the cost aligns with other advocacy tools we have evaluated.

Overall, I would give them a seven or 7.5 out of ten, however, they have yet to prove their weight in gold. So far, I would recommend it to others.

The most valuable feature of Quorum OnQ is quick recovery. We call it a single-click recovery. If any server goes down, crashes, or experiences downtime, we can bring up the DR (Disaster Recovery) server in just two minutes. We also have a "Single Pane of Glass," wherein we work with only a single window. You don't have to use multiple windows to perform basic tasks like failover or failback.

Quorum OnQ's user interface is not very attractive and should be made more attractive.

The turn-around time of Quorum OnQ's customer support should be improved.

I have been using Quorum OnQ for a month now.

Quorum OnQ is a stable solution, and we have not faced any stability issues with it so far.

Quorum OnQ is an easily scalable solution.

We have small and medium-sized customers as of now, and we also have large enterprises using the solution.

The solution’s customer support is good. However, the support could be better, and the turn-around time could be improved.

Neutral

The solution’s initial setup is easy. It takes around 30 to 40 minutes to deploy the solution. Installing any agent or making a DR site takes a couple of hours and not more than that.

For the deployment process, we require one support engineer and one implementation engineer, and the back-end team can quickly resolve any problems if they arise. So one or two engineers are enough for the deployment.

Quorum OnQ is deployed on-premise in our organization. We are trying our best to develop an on-cloud option, but the solution is currently deployed on-premises.

The solution doesn't require any maintenance.

The solution’s pricing is economical. The customers have their own flexibility.

Customers have to pay for an annual license, and the licensing has a subscription model as well as a perpetual license. The customers have to pay for the subscription, and there's also a one-time cost for installation and setup.

The system installation is better with Quorum OnQ. Veeam is mostly all Windows-related, while Quorum OnQ’s server runs on Linux operating system, which is better.

Quorum OnQ is a good solution that competes with market leaders like Veeam and Acronis.

Overall, I rate Quorum OnQ ten out of ten.

I use the solution in my company as a backup and disaster recovery system.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that I can do multiple backups because it offers a backup snapshot functionality.

There was a situation I faced in the past when I contacted the tool's support team, and it took them a while to respond. After that, everything was fine with the tool.

The response time of the support team is an area where improvements are required.

I have been using Quorum OnQ for over a year. I am a customer of the tool.

I haven't had a problem with the solution's stability. Quorum OnQ is a server that basically runs all the time. I look at the stats and see that the tool works.

It is a very scalable solution. Basically, Quorum OnQ has built the appliance to ensure that users get a lot of room for scalability.

I have experience with the product's support team. I got a prompt response via email from the technical team when I forgot my password details. I am impressed with the support team's service, which, even though it is very complex, the end user experience is very simple and straightforward.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I was quite impressed by the fact that everything related to the product's initial setup phase was simple and very straightforward.

For the deployment process, my company had to indulge in some preparation work, after which we got the servers set up, and it took only an hour to finish the setup process.

I received the product's documents, which I used to set up the solution. Every other process related to the deployment of the solution happened remotely.

Being a backup system, Quorum OnQ is an essential tool. The return on investment would be visible only when my company faces a disaster, for instance. The tool is generally part of our company's everyday operations.

Quorum OnQ can be described as a medium-priced product. I think it is a very cost-effective solution because it has two parts, one of which is an instant backup, and the other is sending your backup to the cloud. The tool is worth looking at as it is very cost-effective.

There are no ingress and egress charges in the product. In the organization, there are no limitations when running the appliance, especially in terms of running recovery of replacement hardware over an extended period. There are no penalty costs attached to the solution.

In my company, we haven't faced a scenario where we had to use the product for its data recovery capabilities. During the product's testing phase, our company saw that the product worked. With Quorum OnQ, If my company had to simulate the situation where we have our server down, then within minutes, we would be able to bring up the server and continue our operations.

The tool's automated testing feature is great.

The immediate recovery feature of the tool impacted our company's recovery time objectives since we used it in a situation where we had a server that went down, but we continued running it with the help of Quorum OnQ. In 30 minutes, the server was up, and we continued running it for weeks until a replacement part came in later.

No maintenance is required for the product.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. The ease of use that the tool provides was beyond my expectations.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I use Quorum OnQ for backup and disaster recovery.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use.

it's too early to say what needs improvements at this stage.

The cost could be reduced.

I have experience with Quorum OnQ, and I use it as well.

I have been using Quorum OnQ for a month and a half.

I am working with the latest version.

Quorum OnQ appears to be stable but it's too early to say. So far everything is going very smoothly.

Quorum OnQ is scalable. That was something that was taken into consideration.

It's just a tool that runs in the background with no users until a problem occurs. It's a security tool, a backup system tool, so users don't deal with it until a problem arises.

So far, technical support has been very good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I am not sure how much it costs, but I know it's expensive.

It's an all-in-one solution, and the essential point here is that you don't have multiple solutions that you have to integrate.

What I like about it is that it is a turnkey solution that is very user-friendly, and easy to operate.

Consider the costs and effort involved in having numerous solutions and integrating them. Quorum, on the other hand, is a straightforward integrated solution that caught my attention.

It's far too early for me, but everything so far has been really positive.

I would rate Quorum OnQ an eight out of ten.

Speaker 3:

Let's go with an 8  for the moment, but I should rate it a 10, but I haven't tested it yet to the fullest. That is something that is still in progress.

The most useful feature is the integration and ease of backup and testing.

Quorum OnQ is limited and does not support all the Linux flavours, and it should be integrated. It currently only supports Red Hat-based systems. For example, Ubuntu is not supported. In addition, the price is high and could be more competitive.

We have been using this solution for almost three years.

It is a stable solution.

I am unsure about the scalability because we currently do not need to scale. We use the entry-level system, but we have challenges because a higher system and multiple machines for centralization are required if we want new hardware.

We haven't faced many issues with technical support. But, if we want to use technical support, we need an internet connection, and remote access can be provided. So it's required that the partner engineers be trained on the product, and full access is required to troubleshoot. It also requires local partner engineers. This is an issue for customers with security restrictions where internet access is impossible for the device. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is okay and straightforward, but there are some restrictions because we don't have in-depth access to configuring or troubleshooting. As a partner, we need full access to the system. In addition, we got support from the OnQ team for the initial setup.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. When we have another box implementation, we'll have a more accurate picture of how easy or complex the setup is.

Quorum OnQ works as a backup system for us. It is used for a limited number of systems, and all other systems are on cloud.

The solution has a yearly subscription, or it's a perpetual license. I rate the price a six out of ten because it is pretty high, especially regarding hardware costs.

We evaluated other options and currently use Veeam and other backup data protection products.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. Regarding advice, the marketing of this solution should be better. Customers don't know much about the product, so the OnQ Quorum team should focus on marketing.

We use it as a backup solution. We are using it as a CR agent, and data reputation. What we have in the production we must have another box at theDR center too that is replicating. 

The solution is very cost-effective. 

The subscription must be affordable..

I have been working with Quorum OnQ for three years.

The solution is very stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Previously, I used Veeam and then moved to Quorum because Veeam is only a backup solution but with Quorum I get to backup the whole virtual servers with OS. 

The initial setup is a bit complex. It gets easier once you familiarize yourself with it.

Besides the pricing, Quorum is overall a good solution. I would recommend it. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We tested this solution for the use case of the backup and restoration of our downloaded servers. We were also exploring how we could populate to our end client, so offering it as a service for corporate clients as well. 

It was deployed on-prem, but we wanted to explore the DR as a service and deploy it on our network. They said that they would be partnering with us to provide the DR as a service offering. 

One of the most valuable features was the usability, since many of the features were very straightforward. The backup and restoration process was also very fast. Although we weren't able to fully test the scenarios, one of the features was that we could have it restored on a remote site. However, since we were on-prem, we weren't able to test the remote site restoration. 

The price of Quorum OnQ could be improved. We were exploring the product in terms of having a partnership with the distributor so that we could operate as a service, but for our own use, within the company, we couldn't justify the price unless the servers would become an option later on. The upfront cost of purchasing a license for the hardware is quite steep. 

As for additional features, I would like to see support for other servers. If they leave out distributions like Ubuntu and others, they're limiting their compatibility with servers. 

At the time that we used this solution, we worked with it for about two months. 

This solution is very stable. The performance was very good, the backup process was fast, and restoration was also very good. We were able to get restoration back on fresh drives, and we were able to test spinning up the virtual machine at the backup as well, so that was very convenient. 

Quorum OnQ is very scalable. It can start as a small attached storage device and can go as big as one whole rack, so that's how it can scale up and scale out. For our POC, we were only given the small device to test, so we weren't able to test scalability all the way up to one whole rack. 

We have plans to increase our usage, but it depends on if the distributor will be able to offer disaster recovery of the service. We wouldn't use it on its own, but the way it would work is they would provide the hardware and licenses and we'd just provide the infrastructure. 

We haven't been in contact with technical support since the POC, but we were in close contact with the engineers during the POC. We were quite satisfied with the test, and some improvements would probably be able to support other limits of the solution as well. At the time we were testing, I don't think Ubuntu was supported yet—I'm not sure if it's supported, at this point, but RedHat-based distributions were supported, as well as other distributions.

I have also worked with Proxmox Backup. The main difference is that you can get Proxmox Backup for free, although we availed the support license, just to give back to the community. For the basic needs—backup, restoration, recovery—Proxmox Backup delivers quite well. 

The initial setup process was quite simple and very straightforward. The deployment took less than an hour. There wasn't really any maintenance and we didn't need to run any updates at that time. Once the agents were installed and configured, everything was running fine—restoration worked, and snapshots worked quite well. 

On our end, there was just one technical person working on this product. 

During the implementation, we were in close contact with the distributor, who had technical engineers that helped us throughout the process. We were running some Linux servers that weren't compatible with the product, so we had to test on the servers that were compatible. 

The upfront cost of purchasing a license for the hardware is quite steep.

I would rate Quorum OnQ an eight out of ten, based on the test. 

I would definitely recommend Quorum OnQ to others, especially if they have the budget. I would also say to avail of the service offering. Especially nowadays, with the pandemic hit, budgets have been severely affected, so DR, the servers, or backup of the servers comes in handy. Some CapEx spending has been slashed dramatically on backup, and other servers might help with that. 

We mostly use it for disaster recovery and high-availability. In case of a server failure, we can deploy a server and have the location up and running instantly, within minutes. And then, once the location closes, if we need to, we can do a full restore of the server to new or similar hardware. If it's something as simple as the server going down or becoming unresponsive, we can bring it up, use it for what's needed, and then just transfer the files that needed changing.

The locations don't even know that anything has happened because, if a server goes down they call me. In minutes, I have a virtual version of that server up and running as if nothing had ever happened. It's actually pretty awesome. It's not necessarily that it saves me time on anything. It saves me the headache of losing productivity from my users. In other words, if something were to happen to a physical server, none of my users would lose productivity throughout the day, and the business keeps going as usual.

An example of how it has helped us is that about a year-and-a-half ago, we had a physical server that completely failed. It was our primary domain controller. It's what sends all the instructions to every other domain server to tell it what to do. If it doesn't communicate, we lose a lot. We noticed weird errors happening on the server. We had a hardware technician here and we tried to check things and we tried to repair the actual file system but we lost the array so we lost the data. But, because of Quorum, within two minutes, the branch was back up and running. They knew nothing had happened.

That night, we completely restored that server. It took us about an hour to get everything back up and running. There were some minor configurations that we needed to change after we got the server up and running, the next day. And everything was back to normal. If we hadn't had Quorum in place, within 24 hours, all of the servers would have been out of sync. We would have lost the entire domain and have had to rebuild the domain servers from scratch. That would have taken weeks.

We had noticed the errors at around five o'clock in the afternoon and we decided to wait a little bit. Around six o'clock is when the server failed. By seven o'clock we were back up, everything was running, and we went home for the night.

When it comes to recovering what you need from a backup, it's super-easy. I give their dev team credit for making it super-simple. When we first started with them, it was a little on the clunky side. We were an early customer for them but they have upgraded it over time. I can open up a window share within three minutes and copy the files I need, if I just need specific files. In five minutes, I can have all the files I need for a specific day and go back as many days as I want. We store for 30 days so I can pull 30 days' worth of data. Six years ago that would have taken me about 10 to 15 minutes. It wasn't terrible. 

Now, if it was a restore of servers, that's a different story. If I had to take a server and completely do a bare-metal restore before, it was down a good 4 hours, maybe a little bit less. Now, it's 30 minutes. They really changed the way things go. 

From a disaster-recovery point of view, one of the things I really like is that I can test the virtual copy of the physical server on a test network and compare the servers side-by-side, without interfering with the production network. So I can see and make sure that the latest copy of the server is the physical copy of the server, without interfering with production.

Also, it automatically tests the copies of the servers for me. Whenever there's a copy of a server — bringing it over to the Quorum device to make a copy — it tests it and makes sure it will boot, that everything works fine, and then shuts it down. It sends me a notification saying "backup successful, test successful." I can choose a date that I want within the last 30 days, boot that server up on that specific day, and it will show me every file that was on there. So it does versioning. It will make the changes incrementally, so I can go through them by days. If there are any errors with a snapshot that has been created, I will get a notification and I can test it manually if I need to, or I can look into it why it failed. Maybe the server was in the middle of a reboot when it was trying to create it and created some errors. I can just create a new backup with one click. It sends it over to DR site and it's done.

We're protecting the data we currently have against failures, malware, or ransomware. We can do a one-click restore of files without losing them, so we don't have to pay ransom.

Also, all of the data is significantly compressed, so it does reduce data usage, but it's not something that we use to reduce our data usage.

One nice thing that they added is a single pane of glass to see all of your servers. You can see whether up, down, or transferring. That was a nice addition in version 5.

One thing that could be done to improve it would be a single pane of glass for doing disaster recovery testing, where I could have remote consoles in one place. They may be working towards this, and I haven't necessarily tested all of the features of version 5 yet. It is completely new to me. But as far as DR testing goes, I think I still have to go to each location in a browser and then bring up the console. I'd like to see them integrate that into a single pane of glass so I don't have to go to each server.

We are going on our sixth year using Quorum.

In six years, on the old hardware, I never had to replace the drive and the server never went down. Rarely did I have to do any software maintenance. Updates were done automatically on a device and whenever there was an update that required my intervention, Quorum contacted me and they were more than willing to just say, "Hey, do you want us to do this for you?" and they did most of the stuff on the back-end. I didn't have to do much of anything. 

You have to size it to what you think you're going to be doing. Cloud is different, if you're doing cloud, scalability is infinite. We do on-premise machines, so we scale slightly larger than what we need for future expansion. If we're doing a local branch, which are just file servers that do Active Directory, they're not anything special. But our operations center is backing up six to seven servers, so it's a little bit more beefy. We decided to go 64 cores, just to have that extra power.

Currently, we have everything backed up that we need backed up. Unless we're expecting additional servers to be added, which at the moment I don't think we are, for DR purposes it's exactly what we need.

As far as support goes, whenever I have had an actual problem with something — like one of the servers for some reason stopped transferring data from the HA device to the backup device itself — within a day, I had somebody from Quorum fixing the problem.

If I email tech support I get an email back within the hour, with a date and a time when they are next available. As soon as I agree to that, I have a schedule on my calendar for that specific date and time.

There are a couple of engineers that I talked to regularly because I actually got to know them for deployment. So when I called them, they picked up the phone. They knew it was me. You can create a rapport with them and they're all really nice guys. They're in California and Seattle and one guy I talked to is out of New York.

We were just using NAS devices to back up the data itself. If something were to happen, we would have to physically rebuild a server and import the data back into the server to be up and running.

We looked into Quorum for the ability to have a hot-standby server to power on. It was pretty enticing to not have to worry about rebuilding a server on the spot, if it failed. Being able to image the server back to the physical hardware was also enticing.

The initial setup was really straightforward. I received the servers and, in one day, I had the servers physically deployed to each location. Within two days, we had every server up and running and backing up its current node, and we do have a fairly high amount of bandwidth availability. We had finished with the servers on a Thursday and Friday. By Monday, all of them had sent all of their data to their DR systems. Everything was replicated.

In a matter of five days, we went from having the old system up and running, to dismantling the old system, bringing the new system online, and copying everything over.

When we talked about the deployment, there was a team of engineers I was working with. They took our previous environment — they had all of the information from that — and they sent me a document that I had to fill out, which was super-easy. I gave them a list of IP addresses that they needed. I gave them subnets, gateways, server names, and what I would like the onQ servers to be named. They reviewed that information and came back to me with some changes that they would like to see. We reviewed it and talked and, within a day or two, we had something set that we were going to deploy. Once we did that, they started the work on their end and when I got the servers, they were 90 percent configured.

There were two or three engineers I spoke with for implementation. Then I spoke with an engineer for deployment and another engineer for the miscellaneous odds and ends that we had to finish up with. They were all from Quorum. On our side, it was just me involved. 

As for the integration into our network, I didn't have to do anything. I plugged it in. I'm dead serious. I plugged it in and that's it. You can't get any better that that. Because I sent them all the information for IP addressing, subnetting, servers, set up, how many servers at each location, where the DRs were going to go, how they were going to transfer, it was all done on their test network. They plugged everything in and created all of the links to the devices and then they sent them to me.

Including the ordering of the servers, the whole process took about a month. Once they got the information from me, they had to order servers and receive them, install and configure the software, and get confirmation on where they were going to be shipped.

And I'm the only one involved in maintenance of the solution. I rarely have to do anything with these. They are incredibly low maintenance.

Having Quorum gives us 100 percent uptime. That would be the easiest way I can quantify it. If a server fails, we're still in business. Everything still runs as it should.

It's not possible to put an actual number or value on how much it's saved us. But to give you an idea, without that server — the one I told you about that went down — our lending department would not have been able to function and the branch would not have been able to function, so no transactions would have happened.

What I know is that it saves me headaches.

It depends on the scenario. Sometimes it might not be as impactful. It could be a hard drive failure in a RAID, which is not a big deal. One hard drive fails, you pop it out, pop a new one in, it's rebuilt. Operating system failures can be fixed, but it takes some time. If it's a catastrophic failure, that's where it really comes in handy because we have a copy of the server. We just boot it up, let it run, copy it over to a new server. Done.

If you were to go out and buy a server, you would not pay much more than what you would pay for the devices that they sold us. They took a massive discount off of these devices.

If I were to give you a quote on what the servers would cost, it might not be accurate across the board because each device is configured differently, depending on how much memory you need, how much hard drive space that you need, the processor size, and how many HA devices you're going to be putting on it. There are a lot of factors involved in pricing.

There is also a maintenance agreement for the software and updates. Those also vary in pricing, depending on how many protected nodes are going to be on it. Included in that is the support from Quorum, so if something goes wrong, you give them a call. You get somebody on the phone an hour or so later. You start a remote session and they log in and they take care of everything. It's really nice.

Think about your use case. If you need high-availability immediately, where you don't have to worry about routing and forwarding and transferring the information that you have locally to the cloud, that comes down to choosing cloud versus onsite/on-premise physical devices. 

Cloud is nice. You can route, although it does take a little bit more time, but you have no physical devices on-premise. There is higher bandwidth utilization when you're using cloud, versus on-premise, where you're using your local LAN and WAN. In the latter case, you have a little bit more flexibility.

The other thing I would recommend is making sure that you have enough bandwidth to transfer the data to your DR sites. When we first started, we had T1 lines and it was painful. It worked, but it was painful. Now with the increase in speed, with Metro Ethernets and high-speed fibre, you can do 150 MB or higher, it's really not a problem. Just make sure you have enough bandwidth to transfer the data.

It is a DR solution. It's there for the possibility of a disaster, so we don't have to pull our hair out and work 20-hour shifts just to get a server back up and running. We can actually relax, take our time, and do things right, rather than having to panic and do things in a rush.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using it is that, like with all hardware and software services, you do have to monitor it. It is there in the background doing its job and it does it well, but you have to make sure you're monitoring it, because if something does go wrong and that server fails, you still have the possibility of a failure. But it is good at what it does. It will backup servers, it will do its job well.

In terms of recovering a file or data that someone has overwritten or deleted by accident, that happens all the time. It's normal that someone loses a file. We have several other ways of restoring files so I don't use Quorum all the time. Sometimes I'll use Shadow Copy, because we take shadow copies. Sometimes I have Azure; sometimes I use Quorum. It all depends on how far back and how frequently they need that data. I use whichever one is easily available at the time I need it. Azure is a little bit more difficult than Quorum; it takes two to three minutes to get a file back with Azure. Usually, with Shadow Copy, you can right-click on the folder and you can restore right from that. But we can only go back a few weeks with that. Quorum goes back 30 days.

When you use Quorum, it will go to protected mode. You log in to your portal, go to restore, select files, go to the server, select the date, and then you start. It gives you a URL and you go to that URL and your Windows Explorer and it opens up a File Explorer for that specific time and you can browse the folders.

I have to rate Quorum at 10 out of 10. There's no doubt. It's solid. I don't have to worry at night. Even in the middle of night, if a server fails and I get a notification on my phone saying a server is down, I can log in, start a server, and have that branch operate. In the morning, they don't know that anything happened. It gives me peace of mind. I don't have to stress. There's enough stress in IT; I don't need more.

We're still old-school. We have a tape backup system that we use for the majority of our servers. onQ is kind of like doubling our protection. We like the fact that it's a complete disaster recovery solution, so if we ever lost a server, we could spin it up virtually and get our server repaired and nobody would miss any work or have even noticed a difference, other than possibly a little speed, and we're not even certain they would notice that. 

We also use it for general file recovery every once in a while when somebody deletes something they shouldn't have. We use that scenario as our test, every now and then, to go in and make sure we can still recover stuff. 

We use it for "insurance." We're in central Florida and in the Panhandle and it's a hurricane-prone area. We want to have things covered as much as possible, which is why we back up to the opposite office.

We have one in-house server in each of our two offices. The box in each office cross-replicates to the other. We try to put as little in the cloud as possible. We are slowly moving some things to the cloud, but as far as company data goes, we really want to manage that in-house as long as possible.

We had an instance a few years ago where we lost one of the cards for the RAID controller on one of our servers. When they put the replacement parts back in it didn't recognize our RAID at all. We had to redo the RAID and then we did a complete restore off of the onQ's and it took about three hours. Our server was back exactly where it was the day before and there was very minimal downtime as far as that kind of endeavor is concerned. It worked flawlessly. We've never actually had to do it off of the tape system, but I would think it would be exceptionally tedious because it would take at least the better part of the day to set the server up. And then you would have to worry about copying the directories and making sure you got everything. To recover all the user accounts and system accounts, it would get complicated fairly quickly.

At that time, with Backup Exec, which is made for the tape backup systems by a competitor, I don't even know if you could completely back up the entire volume. You could do the files, but I'm not sure it would do the operating system. The newer versions of software claim they can, but it's still a little bit of a crapshoot as to whether it really recovers the whole system. If it doesn't, then you have to set the server up, re-install the software, and then try and copy your files back. It would be pretty ugly.

Mostly, onQ gives us confidence, knowing that we're really covered if we really have to bring the systems up. It's a complete solution, whereas tape backups, in some of those situations, are not designed to actually spin the system up. They're designed to, at best, copy it to another machine and hope it works. It's comparing apples and oranges. onQ really is a complete system that you can bring up in an emergency. Instead of being down for a couple of hours, you're down for a matter of minutes in a lot of cases.

In terms of recovering a file or data that somebody has overwritten or deleted, we usually get an email or somebody comes by and says, "Oops, I accidentally deleted something from my user folder or out of a directory. Can you get it back?" Generally, we prefer to use the Quorums if we can because they're a lot quicker than the tape backup system. We can drill through a directory pretty quickly and select the location. Backup Exec does very similar things but it's a little bit slower. And we have two different sets of tape. So if it's on another set of tapes, then we might have to physically switch the tapes out, which takes even longer. We don't have that issue with the onQ's, because we keep roughly 40 days of backups for our entire company on there.

When it comes to recovering what you need from a backup, it's really easy. You just drill through the directory, find the file and the date that you want, and click to recover. You then pick the directory you want to save it in. Usually, it takes a minute or two and it's done. It's quick and easy.

One of the other capabilities of these systems, which is really a huge thing to us, is that it does bare-metal restores if you need to. If you had to completely recover a system from tape, if it did work — which I'd be somewhat skeptical about — it would take a long time.

onQ is also pretty good at notifications. We get a report every day, and weekly, regarding the backups and the status of the backups.

It does automated tests to the systems to make sure that you can spin them up if you need to. And if something doesn't come back up in those tests, we get a notification saying the system didn't come back up. You can go in and find out why it didn't. In most cases, it's a timeout issue where the system just didn't give it long enough to actually come up. If we go in ourselves and test it and watch it for a little while, it will do it. Sometimes there's a driver issue because the onQ's may not have every hardware driver on the onQ system itself, to spin the box up. So it will spin up and say it's got a driver issue. You can go online, it'll download the driver, and then you can reboot it.

We've worked with Quorum a couple of times to go in and look at why a system didn't pass the test successfully and they've had to go in and modify a couple of the settings for some of the drivers that it copies. It's happened maybe twice and they're very responsive to doing that kind of stuff.

It does everything automatically by itself. We just sit back and watch the emails for the most part.

There's not much room for improvement in onQ. The systems are pretty stable. Their support is top-notch. I like the fact that their support seems to be in North America solely, so there aren't any language issues. I really don't have any complaints.

The one thing they could do is some tweaking on the web solution that's supposed to monitor everything from one page, rather than having to bring each server up on its own webpage. It doesn't always accurately show what the system's state is at the time, and we have to restart that process now and then. But it's not really affecting productivity. It just would make our monitoring slightly easier.

We've been using onQ since 2012. We're on our second set of disaster recovery boxes. We just replaced them earlier this year.

Our onQ's are very stable. We very rarely have to reboot them. We don't have any real configuration issues or issues communicating with them. Any of the issues we've had have usually been a result of something on our end, such as network problems or something dropping between the two offices, which had nothing to do with their systems.

The scalability is very good. We bought ours big enough so that we could add another server if we needed to. But we never did max out even the old ones by the time we were done with them. And we ran them for seven years. We've had no issues with scalability. We never outgrew them or ran into storage space issues. 

I believe the maximum they recommend is about 40 days, but whatever their default was is what we left it at. We could probably even increase that some if we wanted to and not have any major problems, but we haven't had any need to.

The only way we would be able to increase the usage would be to add more servers. They're doing exactly what they were designed to do, which is give us an assurance that, should we lose one of our production servers, we can spin it up on the onQ's within a matter of minutes and keep working.

Quorum's support, compared to any of the people we've dealt with, which has primarily been Symantec, is far superior.

Their support agents are very efficient, for the most part. They can usually resolve things. A couple of times we've had things that an engineer needed to look at. That was a case where our network connection between the two offices dropped, due to nothing related to Quorum. They had to go in and do a little bit of cleanup, get the files cleared out so it could do a proper backup. But that's happened maybe once or twice in seven years. Overall, they do what they say they do and they do it very well.

When you buy the server it comes with three years of support and, after that, you have to do a renewal process. But it's the standard support that comes with the system. When you buy it, you can pick which support level you want. You can get it five days a week during business hours, seven days a week during business hours, or 24/7. It all depends on what you need. We have the five-day, business-hours support but it's worked very well for us.

We were using Symantec prior to Quorum and we still have it because the system is still running. We keep a support contract with them. Our tape library is so large that we can hold six months' worth of backups. That gives us an extended range if we really needed to get some old data off of there. But generally, we go to the quorum first because it is just a lot simpler to use.

What prompted us to look into getting another solution was beefing up our disaster recovery plans, because of things like the hurricanes that we have. Ten or 15 years ago you'd get one hurricane every five or 10 years. Now we're getting to the point, with whatever's happening in the environment, that we have hurricanes two or three times a year. The onQ's are an "insurance policy" that if something fails, we've got a pretty complete system that we can bring online in a short amount of time. Or if we had to replace the hardware, we could copy everything back onto a new piece of equipment and it would work. It allows us to sleep at night.

The initial setup was easy. They helped us. All we had to do was install the boxes. Once we installed the boxes, they connected remotely and helped set everything up. We installed the client on the servers that needed to have them and they configured things and made sure everything was running with a little bit of testing. Then they let us go. They checked back a week or two later just to see how things were going. But we've had so few issues that it's pretty infrequent that we have to talk to these guys.

The integration process with our organization's network was easy and seamless. There was very little impact. The only thing we had to do is because we have an internet connection to our sister office, an MPLS network. At one point we had to increase our bandwidth. At certain times of the day — although we tried to do it just at night — if there was a large amount of data to replicate, then it would still be running the next morning. And that impacted things to a slight degree. After upping our bandwidth we had no issues at all.

The deployment of our newest boxes took two-thirds of a day or so. The biggest problem was my getting the other box up to Tallahassee. We could have had it shipped, but we don't have any IT in that other office, so one of us had to go up there. So the delay was really on our end because I had to get the hardware up there and install it. We spent two or three hours in the Orlando office setting all that up and then another two or three hours in our Tallahassee office setting up the other box. Altogether, it was definitely less than a day.

Quorum maps out the implementation plan for you. They do some research in the beginning, before the box is ever shipped. They needed an IP range for five or six IP addresses. We sent that to them and they labeled what was going to be the interface for each office. They've got it down to a pretty streamlined process where there's really not a lot of lag time or any mysterious questions.

It takes one person, from our side, for deployment. We have a staff of two people in our IT department. The other person I work with stayed here while I was in the other office setting it up. Since we're the only people in the IT department, nobody else would be going in and using it.

In terms of maintenance, there really is none on the Quorum boxes. They push out updates every once in a while. Generally, they contact us and say, "Hey, we have a couple of updates to put on there." It's usually 30 minutes every now and then. I wouldn't even say that happens on a regular basis. They've done their homework and their hardware works pretty dependably.

In terms of capital expenditure, the main thing the solution has done is to allow us to really utilize our hardware to the maximum. Money is always an issue for a company of our size, and we don't always have the capital to replace servers on a regular basis. This gives us the ability, technically, to run servers until they just stop running, if we really want to. We're in that scenario now where we've got a system that still runs, but we have to replace the hardware because the operating system is no longer supported. onQ has allowed us to get every bit of life out of a server, which does lower our bottom-line.

It has saved us $40,000 or so, the cost of two or three servers. It has allowed us to run two or three servers a lot longer than we normally would have. Sometimes, we're getting another year or two out of them.

I wouldn't look at it as a return on investment, any more than you would look at the return on investment for an insurance policy. It's there if you need it and you hope you don't have to use it. In the meantime, we use it for some basic file recovery and some other things, plus it helps us meet some of our HIPAA compliance issues in terms of being able to recover, and as part of our disaster plan. There's value there, but I'm not a bean-counter so it's hard to put a dollar amount to it without doing a lot of analyzing.

The initial expenditure for us was a little under $40,000 for the recent renewal. For the first three years after that, other than electricity, there's no cost. After that, their support contract has to be renewed annually. We spent close to $6,000, between the two offices, for support. That's not a big deal when you're pretty much guaranteed that you're going to be able to recover in an emergency situation. That's well worth it.

I think they're really reasonable. If you price out servers like the ones they put in here, and even if you were to put it in your own system — without figuring out the software and all of the logistics of doing that — it would cost you almost as much just to buy the hardware. Microsoft licensing is very expensive and, if you're going to do anything on your own, you've got to have a team of developers. That's just not something we're in the business of doing with a small IT department. We don't have time to do stuff like that.

We didn't evaluate other solutions. A colleague of mine and I went to a lunch, to one of Quorum's seminars one day, and we were very impressed with the presentation. Everything they said made sense and we didn't really see any need to look any further. And we still don't or we wouldn't have bought another set of them.

Symantec is slow, at least for our solution. I'm sure they have cloud backups but, as I said, our resistance to putting any more in the cloud than we have to is pretty high. We're really trying to keep things in-house. And without spending a ton on hardware, tape is just slower. 

It was a cost thing primarily, but also speed. Personally, and not to bad-mouth competitors, Symantec's support is very difficult to navigate and to get any real attention from on a lot of issues, and that definitely doesn't happen in a timely manner. We don't have that problem with Quorum. They're very responsive.

Check out the competitors. I was so impressed with Quorum that we haven't checked out anybody else. We just wanted to stay with them. We have a good relationship with them. But do your homework and have them really demonstrate what it can do for you. I think you will be just as impressed.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using onQ is that it's a system that works. We've lost a server and done a complete recovery in a matter of hours. That's really all the convincing we needed, to know that the system works. If needed, it does what they say it will do. It did it flawlessly. There was no, "Oh, we're going to have to tweak this" or, "Oh, we're going to have to do that." When we lost that server, as soon as we got it up and running, they were on the phone. They guided us through the few things we needed to do. The whole thing was just a matter of hours to have it back up and running. It doesn't get any better than that, to me.

The solution hasn't affected our overall storage efficiency. It doesn't impact anything on the servers. It's a small footprint and runs in conjunction with our Backup Exec. They don't seem to step on each other, so it doesn't cost us any additional time. It just does its thing on its own without any interference. It's pretty slick.

They're always coming up with new stuff, but we haven't really looked into everything. Our needs are pretty simple. Things change very slowly in our company so we're not really looking to expand anything right now. But if they had other products, we'd probably look at them.

The solution is a 10 out of 10. It's well-designed. It does what they say it'll do and they back up what they say. They help you if you need it. I wouldn't change anything. We're really pleased with them. They're a great company and anytime we've needed help they've been there. They have jumped right into it.

The main purpose is as a faster disaster recovery solution. The secondary use case is for quick, daily backups.

About two years ago, I had a Windows 2008 Server for the fire department on which two hard drives dies almost simultaneously. HPE was nice enough to send me a couple of new drives overnight, but it didn't help the situation because the server was dead. So I spun up that entire fire department server, which had SQL running on it and a couple of databases that are necessary for dispatching fire calls and getting the information out of our dispatch system for tracking, timing, etc. I was able to bring the server up in about five minutes. I left it up and running for about two weeks.

I didn't do the bare metal restore because it was a Windows 2008 Server that was scheduled to be replaced that year anyway. I just let it run for a while and when I got new hardware I built it up as a Windows 2012 Server, at the time. I was able to do it on my timeline, rather than being in a panic situation and having to get the server back up. The entire time, while it was running in this virtual host, it was also backing up at the same time. If necessary, I could have gone to any of my backups, which sounds weird — it's a backup of a machine that's running on a machine — but I could have gone to any of those backups. That was the only instance that I've had to rely on any of its features, above and beyond just restoring files when people mess up and delete something.

The case of somebody overwriting or deleting something by accident, where I have had to recover a file or data, happens more often than I would like to admit. I find myself having to restore a one-off file about once a month. It happens more around budget time. People take the stuff from last year that they think they made copies of and make them into blank documents for this year. Inadvertently, they're working on the wrong ones and I get to restore those. That seems to happen at least once or twice every budget year. 

Another scenario is that somebody comes to me and says, "This file was supposed to be in this directory. I either accidentally overwrote it or I accidentally deleted it a few weeks ago and I need it back." If they're really good about it, they'll tell me the name of a file or a directory, which gives me something to work with. Hopefully, they'll give me a rough time that they know it existed. I'll just start working through snapshots. I'll open up AD servers that have all of my file shares on them and I'll pick a date. I'll start with January first. If the file is not there I'll move to January second. I'll continue going through all of my snapshots so that I get them the absolute latest and greatest one that there is and which is still functional.

Another instance where I'm having to restore on a somewhat regular basis is when people leave, depending on the situation and why they left. They may not be doing it maliciously or they may be trying to either cover their own tracks or trying to make it difficult for the next person. They'll delete everything that they've got. I'll go into their Outlook and they've got three emails, but they've been here for four years. So I'll have to restore all of their mailbox from a few weeks prior to their putting in their request to leave, and start restoring files as well. That happens about twice a year where I have to go to that extreme.

There isn't a cut and dry process in that situation. When I get notification that somebody is leaving, I back up their email, for records retention. If I realize all their mail is gone, or it seems like there's stuff missing, I'll start restoring old stuff from the past and see what they got rid of. It makes the life of the person who will be following them in that job position about a million times easier if they've got some idea of the communications the previous person had or any notes or documents they had for that job.

I also benefit from the solution's deduplication, especially with their new software release, and how they're arranging the storage for the disaster of virtual machines. It is handled differently. It doubled the amount of space that's available for my backups. The deduplication helps, obviously, because I'm not having to back up the same caches over and over again.

By far, one of the biggest features is that, even on the absolutely run-of-the-mill box, if I lose any one of my servers I can automatically bring it up virtually on the physical onQ Quorum device.

Another feature I really like about it is the fact that, after every backup, it automatically spins up every one of the hosts and confirms that it is actually a good backup and running. I know that if I ever have to rely on them, they are available for me. That is another of the biggest features. I've got 30 or so servers here and the vast majority are pretty critical for police, fire, water distribution, etc. I can't just pick and choose and say "Okay, I know I lost everything but let me just concentrate on this one," because, in reality, a lot of them are awfully important and really cannot be down for any length of time. That's why I really like the checking aspect of every backup, and I know that Windows will start up every time for me.

When it comes to recovering what you need from a backup, they've got a handful of different approaches for gaining access to the files. I can spin up the entire VM and go find the files, or I can go off a specific application at any one of my snapshot points in time. Or I can open them up as a Windows share, and drill out from there for everything, using Windows Explorer. Or, I could just say, "I just want you to list entire directories." There are many options, depending on what your needs are for recovering the files. It's on a needs basis. If somebody comes to me and says "Hey, I just need this one file," I'll go grab just the one file. If I'm restoring a handful of directories, it's natural for me to check the user and hit "restore," refer them back to the original location, and I'm good to go. There are multiple options available, which is nice.

I use the solution's automated testing functionality. It happens every time the backup runs. In my instance, I run backups twice a day, at noon and midnight. It tests automatically after every backup. I get an email notification every morning and I scroll through it and I look for how many good backups I had and, at the very bottom, how many successful tests it was able to do with the automated features. It's an incredibly important aspect of the solution. There are a lot of people out there who will run backups all day, blindly trusting that everything is working and that, if they have to restore they can do so or can spin it up in the cloud. If they never had it perform the task, or they do it so incredibly rarely that they only then realize "Oh crap, Windows won't even start," or "some applications within it don't start," they're now scrambling. Luckily, since I know that it's spinning them up automatically for me, I know at the very least that Windows is going to be coming up and give me a good starting spot. I find it to be an incredibly important feature. It definitely sets my mind at ease knowing that it's doing that after every backup.

I would really like it if they followed comparable products from other vendors and had an option where you could offload to tape. I know it sounds incredibly antiquated, but the benefit I see is that there would be a better air gap than you have with backing up to an online source.

For instance, if somebody were to get onto your network, whether it's this device or any other device, they could destroy your primary backup. And they could tell it to delete all those hosts off of the cloud, and it does so because, in the normal lifecycle of servers, you take servers on and offline all the time, so that functionality has to exist. That could leave you with a network with nothing, and no backups.

But if you were taking your Quorum, or your other disaster recovery device, and dropping it to tape every week or every month for long-term retention, while the malicious actor could still do the exact same process, it would be pretty tough for them to destroy the tapes that are in a safe that have been in there every week for the entire year. That is one feature that I think would add a layer of security. It's a feature that other vendors have, and one which would help set an IT person's mind at ease knowing that, while it is an old technology, the benefit is there and the availability is there.

I have been using Quorum for about five years. The physical appliance is a 260 and the version of the software is their 5.0 platform.

Quorum's physical appliance is pretty rock-solid. I've had no problems with it. 

I'm not sure if I could say how stable the company is because I don't know how large a company it is and what its market saturation is and how long it will be in the market. It's obviously not the market leader for this segment. I'm okay with that because I've already bought two of their appliances. But, as far as their appliance is concerned, even if they were to disappear today, I would have no problem continuing to run this solution for another few years, because of my comfort with it and how solid the physical product is.

I'm not sure what the scalability is like. If I decided I need more drive space I don't know if there are any options for actually physically expanding that out.

For some reason, my city council thinks that I should be able to predict five years into the future. They asked me to try to predict what I'm going to need in five years. It's impossible to predict that far in advance. But I'm going to say at this point that I've got five more years of usage out of this solution. I built it up so that I could handle about a 30 percent increase over what I've got now.

I messed up the first time I did this. I chose that number but I didn't look at my own roadmap. I then realized that in three years I would be putting in a full-fledged document imaging solution. I ended up over-utilizing my space really quickly because of that one, unexpected, server. That resulted in my purchasing an updated appliance one year before I was planning on to, because I didn't plan appropriately.

When I called in at the beginning, right when I was getting acclimated to the system, I'd always get the same guy, over and over again. The guy was brilliant. Then, about four years ago, it seems they decided to send it offsite. Nobody would pick up my call, and I had to go through my account manager to get anybody. The last couple of years, however, have been great. I'll call and, within a couple of hours, they're calling me back, as long as it's not an emergency situation. So, support has been good so far.

There was even one instance where we had a problem with something called Qfilter. They were calling me a couple of times a day to see how my backups were running, to see if we had improvements. I was working with the engineers to try to figure out why this thing wasn't working. They had no problem ramping me up the support chain pretty quickly, all the way up to the people who were basically in the back end and doing writing.

Where I work right now, before this solution there was an old Symantec Backup Exec tape system. I came from the consulting industry prior to this, about five or six years ago, and I had set up numerous Barracuda backups, along with about three Unitrends appliances as well.

I found the initial setup to be incredibly easy, compared to other backup solutions. It's as simple as giving it an IP address. It gives you the option to download the agent and you put the agent onto that server. You double click, you hit about three buttons, and instantly, the next thing it's saying is, "What's your retention time, and how often do you want to back up?" That was about it.

It's incredibly intuitive and straightforward. You're not running through hundreds of screens to get what you're after. There aren't hundreds of options out there that the typical user would ever even need to touch. That is by far one of the big reasons I've stuck with this solution, because it's so incredibly easy to use.

To get all 30 servers done it took me about two hours. It took me longer to get it out of the box and into the rack. I had already given them the IP information beforehand, so they had it pre-programmed. They said, "Plug these network cables into this specific VLAN, power it up, go to this website, and we'll call you at 2 o'clock on this day."

The training, from knowing absolutely nothing to being up and running, took about an hour-and-a-half. Then it took me, maybe, half an hour to an hour to get all the servers on.

Integrating the solution within our network was really easy. I gave them an idea of what the VLANs were for my servers, even before they shipped the appliance to me. They did the vast majority of the work before me. It came with a sheet of paper that said, "The first three interfaces need to be on VLAN one, the last interface needs to be on VLANs one and nine." I went into my network switch gear and I set tag ports for both of those specific devices, and I plugged it in. After that, I just made sure that I could see traffic on my network interfaces. It was a breeze.

Backups are kind of like insurance. It's tough for me to say whether I've seen any kind of return. Every time I've had to restore something, whether it's missing files or an Exchange mailbox, it has performed exactly how I hoped it would. When I lost the entire fire server, it performed exactly as I expected it to. In that sense, as far as the appliance is concerned, its sole purpose is to be your backup appliance and hold onto a retention. It has done exactly as I expected it to.

Like insurance, it's one of those things that you're bent out of shape that you're paying for it. Then all of sudden when you need it, it's the greatest thing on the planet.

I wouldn't say the solution lowered my capital expenditure by requiring less hardware. My solution prior to this was a tape drive. A tape drive typically attaches to a server. At the time it was attached to another server that I was already utilizing for Active Directory. So my expenditure for the tape solution was an auto changer and a whole pile of tapes. It wasn't a too terribly costly backup solution.

What I gained and by going to another appliance that was more full-featured, whether it be, say, a Quorum or a Unitrends or any other full boxes with the additional functionality, was peace of mind. I know I can bring these servers up quickly, and that they're being tested, and I'm getting backups multiple times a day. That offsets the change in cost because this is a full-featured box. You're buying a whole other server that has the software built into it. Overall, it is more expensive than a single tape drive, but it's no more expensive than any other appliance, like a Unitrends.

It's been a while since I've purchased it and I only do maintenance now. Licensing is based on of the number of nodes you have, the number of end devices you're backing up. It's based on the cloud service, if you're going to have that. And, if you're going to have multiple devices that are backups of each other, they will have their own. But most of these are pretty straightforward. The only one that I don't have experience with is the bare metal restore. I don't know how that's licensed.

A reason I chose them over Unitrends on my most recent purchase, is that the one thing I was seriously lacking was memory and CPU cores. When I got on with both Unitrends and Quorum I said, "Hey, I need this much memory and this many cores." Unitrends' solution was to move me up in physical boxes. So they moved me up a few tiers, which also resulted in significantly more drive space, which was the one thing I did not need. Quorum, on the other hand, took one of their lower-end boxes, one which had sufficient drive space for me but which was just lacking in memory and CPUs, and they threw a bunch more CPU cores into it and a bunch more memory, which fulfilled all of my requirements.

Among Quorum, Barracuda, and Unitrends, the Quorum is by far the easiest one to use in terms of sizing. Multiple times, I would put Barracuda solutions in and I don't know if it was their deduplication that kept messing me up, but I'd size it, and determine, "Okay, we should be able to get 90 days of backups out of this thing." But right-out-of-the box I was getting about 30 days. Clients weren't too terribly happy with me as a result. The bare metal restore was pretty rough on the Barracuda as well. I would probably not even suggest Barracuda to people now, unless they are interested in a cheap solution. One thing Barracuda does offer is a solution that is considerably cheaper than either of the other two.

The Unitrends appliance wasn't bad. It was easy to set up. I found that restoring and bringing up virtual machines was more difficult and it did not scale quite as well. I could not have nearly as many virtual machines running on the Unitrends appliance as I could have on the Quorum appliance, even though it was sized by the vendor. The maintenance was also more expensive on the Unitrends appliance than on the Quorum.

Figure out what your business needs are and determine if you need one appliance or two appliances for a disaster recovery physical site. Or are you're going to need to bring up these virtual machines in a cloud instance and, if so, how are you going to get access to those servers through a public cloud like the internet, through either VPNs or other software-defined networks?

If somebody were to ask me what they need to do to implement this, I would definitely say know what your requirements and expectations are, and make sure you get those included beforehand. Get the thing properly spec'ed out so that it will survive the length of time you're after. Or, be prepared to take a long-term retention kick if you add resources faster than you anticipated.

I sleep better knowing that Quorum is there. My full tape backup was using seven tapes, and tapes can be a little finicky. Sometimes, they just don't want to work. I don't have that problem anymore. I know that I've got a good backup. It backs up, I get a notification, and it brings up all of those servers automatically for me.

It's one of those things where, regardless of the appliance you go with, you still need to bring up all those virtual machines and make sure all the applications work in them, in a virtual environment. I did run into a solution where that didn't work. I had one sever that runs an old IBM Db2 application, and it did not like coming up in a virtual environment because the virtual environment was bringing up both IPv4 and IPv6 and Db2 was trying to attach to the wrong one. So the server came up great but the database did not come up at all. I ended up having to call Quorum and say, "Okay, how do I get this thing not to use IPv6, only IPv4?" It took them 15 minutes. I ran a test again and it worked like a champ.

Also, there are some applications that do licensing via hardware tokens, where they do licensing via the MAC address of the network card. For instance, my phone system is that way. While I can spin it up on the Quorum box, I can only do it for a very limited time, because it only gives me a temporary license for, say, 30 days, before I will lose my phone system. So, there are other things to take into consideration, but you're going to run into that regardless of where you spin up a virtual machine, whether it's the cloud or on a physical appliance.

In terms of storage efficiency, I'm not entirely sure it's considered a storage appliance. I would think of something like a NAS as being a storage appliance, where people are actively working on files on and off of it. Quorum is really not a storage appliance, it's a backup. It definitely has storage because it's disk-based, but it beats the crap out of tape, if I have to compare it to a storage device. I would much rather use it over having a bunch of drives and some other solution. I would rather use the simplicity of the Quorum appliance over other backup solutions, even if they are disk-based.

I'm an IT department of one, so nobody else has their hands in it except for me. We do have a couple of hundred employees, but none of them even know about it. That's really how it should be. They should just know that everything is backed up and, if they need something restored, they just need to give me a call and I've got them covered.