N-able Cove Data Protection Valuable Features

MP
Director at BACK OFFICE IT LTD

The biggest thing from our point of view is its reliability. It gives us very few problems compared to other solutions that we have trialed. 

You can maintain multiple copies of the hot standbys, which is a huge benefit to the protection of customers.

It is adaptable.

The efficiency of the solution’s resource and bandwidth use when it comes to both backup and recovery is extremely good. Most of the time, I'll arrive in the morning, grab my morning coffee, fire up the console, and it's all green ticks, then the job is done and we send the customer their invoice. It's difficult to think of any way that the efficiency could be improved because it all just sort of works in a sensible time.

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BS
Owner at Simple Tech LLC

The cloud-based data protection we get from the solution is huge because we've transformed almost all of our clients to 365. Prior to this, we tried a few different backups and had multiple backups for different items. Now, I can go into one dashboard and have direct access to the 365 data. It's extremely easy to set up and monitor. It's extremely easy to deploy no matter where the device is or if it's a 365 account or machine.

The vendor has 30-day centers worldwide to help keep backups in the regions where they need them. That's really big because one of the issues I had with a previous vendor was that their backup site either had a couple of locations or it was just really far from my location. The latency seemed really poor, and a lot of backups were failing. With this solution, I can put data near almost any client and have reliable bandwidth there, which is really important to me.

The solution streamlined the way we handle data protection across all device types and customers. We're able to deploy an agent through our RMM with the scripting we're able to do and without going onto the machine. Then we're able to apply different packages right away. I can even have the admin deploy backup to computers. I don't even need to have a technician do it. The ability to pull off technicians from doing basic installations is huge. We're now able to automate most of it, and admins can do the rest of it, so I don't have to pay a technician just to do installations.

On the restore side, it's streamlined a lot and improved the service levels we offer because we're able to recover so quickly. Typically, a technician could be restoring something for about 30 minutes. Now, we're able to restore what the client needs, and the ticket is closed within 10 minutes. Our turnaround time was cut in half. The reports are also streamlined. Overall, our clients can tell that it's streamlined because of how quickly we're able to recover and give them feedback reports. It's really stopped a lot of questions coming in because we're able to give them reports that show that the backup is continuously working. Whereas before, we would have to give a lot of explanations on why backups failed on certain days and what was going on.

An image-based backup is good for clients who might be closer to a certain data center. However, I had so many issues. For example, I couldn't even restore the image, so I had to just pull the data file. The product worked maybe 30% of the time when I did an image restore. 

With Cove, it's at least 90% or higher. I just restore it and it works. Sometimes I have to tweak it, and that's just from putting on different hardware, but with the image-based backup, I've done servers, workstations, and many different types of machines, and it has at least a high 90% reliability on the image side. That is huge because it saves so much time to restore an image rather than trying to re-download all the software, install and get all the data back. The image is incredible.

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Jack Henson - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at Henson Business Products

The user interface is the most valuable. It gives us the ability to check everything. With more than 100 endpoints running that software, I like the ability to quickly check that everything is working correctly. That's one of the biggest selling points.

I've been able to recover everything that I've tried to recover.

It's important to me that the solution provides cloud-based data protection that includes backup, disaster recovery, and archiving because that's the only reason I use it. It gives our clients an offsite backup solution that's basically automated and that we don't have to worry about, or we're at least able to easily monitor its success.

Cloud storage is important to us because it gives us the ability to wrap everything into one package and not have to worry about a secondary source for cloud storage. It's much easier this way.

We're fairly local, but the fact that the vendors have 30 data centers worldwide is good for redundancy.

Compared to other solutions, the efficiency of Cove's architecture for image-based backups is as good as any. The recovery and speed are as good as any solution that we've had experience with.

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Buyer's Guide
N-able Cove Data Protection
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about N-able Cove Data Protection. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
CONRAD FORREST - PeerSpot reviewer
President at MTS Consulting Group, Inc.

I am an N-able partner. One of the bigger features and advantages of the solution is that it is easy to integrate with my RMM which is also N-able. 

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Cosimo Berlingieri - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Security and Backup at RDP Consultants

What I like the most about it's the ease of use and the reliability that it has when copying information to the cloud. It seems to be very efficient. We tried some sample restores. It was very easy to use either to restore to the original location or to a different location. We didn't have any issues with it. So, overall, we are satisfied with it.

It provides cloud-based data protection that includes backup, disaster recovery, and archiving. It's very important that it has all those features. In today's world, the reliability of the actual backups is a must. It's important that the backup doesn't keep having issues and that it's able to synchronize everything on the cloud. It's also very useful when it does a restore. It's very efficient. It has a very simple and easy-to-use design and web interface.

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Scott J Brunton - PeerSpot reviewer
Account Manager at IronCloud Technologies

The most valuable feature is how well it backs up and restores. The ease of use and the console are great. That is one of the most sought-after features we were looking for - to be able to do all that remotely without having to interrupt the user.

It's pretty important to us that the solution provides cloud-based data protection that includes backup disaster recovery and archiving. Most of our clients will back up flat files without having to do full system backups, however, we do full system backups just to make sure we catch everything. In full transparency, we have not had to do a full system restore. I can't testify to how that works, however, restoring flat files, works well.

It was very important to have thirty data centers worldwide to help keep backups in the regions where we needed them since our clients ask us about redundancy all the time. We care about it too. The security of the data centers and the number of data centers and redundancy are very important to us. This delivers in that sense.

We realized the benefits of the solution right after the first full backup. It gave us an idea of how long it takes and allowed us to test for stores and performance, within a matter of a couple of days. We could see that it was working. Of course, we wanted to be a little guarded and give it a week or a couple of weeks, or a month to make sure. However, after a couple of days, we were comfortable with it.

It was important for us that the solution's cloud-first architecture gets our backups off of local networks and out of the reach of ransomware. If it's air-gapped, it’s ideal. If the local site got hit by a ransomware attack, at least there's something offsite that has not been affected, which is critical.

When it comes to delivering data protection, the solution has reduced the time or resources needed for administration. Just to have the data backed up and then having an easy-to-use console portal to restore data has reduced them significantly. It’s probably a few hours a month. In terms of human resources, we’re not necessarily saving on resources, rather, we’re able to be more efficient with the resources we have, so we can do more with the same amount of people.

We are an MSP. We're standardized on Cove and all our new clients get that as their backup, and, in some cases, server backup solutions.

With streamlining, we can use our remote monitoring management tool, to push it out and everything's automated. Tying that in with our ticketing system, we can tell when the backups failed, which makes everything extremely efficient.

The product does seem to be quite efficient in data storage. I'm really surprised how small the data sets are to back up the entire machine. We are saving, considering if we do full image-based backups, anywhere from, I'd say 30% to 60%.

We save on storage costs. We get a healthy allotment from N-Able to back up, however, there are real limits that we have to match or stay under and we haven't crossed those yet.

The efficiency of the solution's architecture to other image-based backups seems pretty intuitive from just the handful I've tested out before. It's all web-based, which is really nice. I don't have to download any products or applications. It just seems like they do a pretty good job with efficiency.

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JC
Service Manager at Computer Guild

The most valuable feature by far is the Virtual Disaster Recovery. On top of that is the bare-metal recovery. The recovery options that we have are great. We have tested the Virtual Disaster Recovery and the bare-metal recovery in just about any scenario you can think of. We have even restored bare metal, a full server, to a laptop, and had full functionality. It's just insane how well it works and how simple it is. It does most of the work for you. I don't feel like I'm thinking too hard when I do this. I understand how the system works on the back-end, and what it needs to do, but I don't want to concentrate on that when I've got so many other things going on. This really does just so much of the legwork for me.

In terms of other types of recovery scenarios, it covers something as simple as somebody who has access to a shared folder and they delete a file on it because they weren't thinking about the fact that it's for everybody, not just for them. That's the scenario where, if it's within 30 days — because this has a 30-day history for backup — they call me and tell me that they deleted the file. I just ask them for either the file name or location or as much stuff as they can remember. I log in to the backup system from my console, get into the recovery part remotely — I don't even have to log in to the workstation hosts or the server host — I find yesterday's file and folder lists from a nice calendar view, and then I find the file that was there. I click it and restore it to the machine. I can restore it to a different spot if I want, but I usually just choose to restore it in place. I call them and confirm it's there. I've never had to take more than five minutes. It's quite nice for doing basic stuff like that.

A more extreme case was when we had somebody's entire system go down and we were able to virtually restore it, no issues whatsoever, getting it running offsite. We were able to link them up on a VPN until we got a temporary server there and fixed things, because they had a catastrophic failure. Luckily it was a simple server, so it wasn't too much work, but it was nice to keep them up, with their domain, in the meantime.

The most complicated recovery scenario is a host machine running multiple VMs, where we only have the host machine, itself, backed up. This is somebody who doesn't want to pay for the second server onsite, so our company has temporary servers. We're very physically close, meaning we can do a bare metal restore or a virtual disaster recovery and get everything they have up and running within about an hour after the failure. That is one where we have the file folder system state and VSS backup recovery running and, no matter what fails on their system, we can get it back out. Even if it's not full system failure, we can restore most things remotely. If it is full system failure, even if we have to bring it to a different site, we can get the data down within about an hour and then get it to wherever they need.

SolarWinds is very flexible and lets us do things the way we want to and we can do them quickly. For the clients that don't want to pay for that extra stuff to get it done quickly, we can explain to them that it's going to set things back this much. We really let our clients choose how they want to do things like this. So if they want a backup and recovery system, this one is very easy, because it's paid month-to-month and has very specific data caps and overage charges for those caps. It's super-easy to lay it out for any level of client, be it a one-person operation or a business that has 300 users and allows "bring your own computer."

Depending on what they have, we can give them an easy projection of what their investment in a system like that would be. There won't be any surprises such as, "Oh, we went over 1 terabyte, we now have to get to the 5 terabyte cap," which is something I had to deal with when I used Carbonite. Instead, if I go a gigabyte over the standard cap for a server or workstation, I pay a set amount of money that doesn't scale up or down. I know exactly what I can do with this solution for any client. I know exactly how much I can charge them and it's done monthly. It's easy for them to drop in and drop out on a monthly basis if they're nervous, because they're not dealing with that annual commitment that a lot of solutions shove at you, even if you get to pay monthly. That's a really big advantage in terms of peace of mind after it gets running.

And all of that is aside from the fact that they give you free archiving, which is really nice. Not many other solutions do that, cost-wise. I get to do as many archives of a system as I want and it doesn't count against the data for that user or customer.

It also gives me a single dashboard for all types of different sources it's backing up, such as databases, files and folders, system state, etc. It gives you your entire client list. It gives you a daily update of green, yellow, or red. Yellow means something kind of went wrong and maybe you should look at it, but wait. Red means something definitely went wrong and you need to take some sort of action to adjust. Green means every single thing worked properly, nothing had any errors.

I get a daily email that I'm able to integrate into my ticket system. The tickets come in only if anything fails. If something fails, my technicians get details of exactly what failed with an error code. And if I go into the console and look at the error itself, it gives me details and a resource center, from SolarWinds, where I can look it up. I can Google from there and figure it out.

That kind of information has made our backup operations much smoother, especially because the few times the Help articles haven't answered something for us, support has eventually gotten it to work, even if it seemed like a niche situation where we've got five other clients deployed like this yet one of them is having this really odd issue. SolarWinds support has been able to dig down. I have sent them logs and they've looked through them — hundreds of lines. They highlighted one, showed me what was wrong, told me what to fix, and it worked after that.

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Richard Muniz - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Admin at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

All its features are valuable. Perhaps the biggest value we've gotten out of it is the backup and restore of anything a user happens to lose.

Another feature I really like is that we can stagger our backups a little bit. By that I mean we can download whatever needs to be backed up to an external disk, or do it locally and then load it up. That has proven to be very valuable in a couple of cases, especially with people who have bad connections.

It's very important to us that Cove provides cloud-based data protection. Disk space is something we always fight for, whereas this solution is out there and secure. We don't have to worry about it. And to make matters even better, our users can get it from anywhere in the world, if they need to.

In addition, because the package includes cloud storage, we don't need to worry about hosting it inside. That was very important to us. And because the vendor has data centers worldwide, our reps in Europe and other places can get to what they need quickly and easily. Those local data centers also mean we were able to meet legal requirements.

The cloud-first architecture, in addition to eliminating the need to worry about hosting the storage, is very convenient because we have a very mobile workforce. Our people know how to get back what they deleted, quickly and easily. And, of course, the redundancy helps.

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JC
Sr. Network/System Administrator Support at S & L Computer Services, Inc.

I've been in IT for over 40 years, and I've tested and tried about every backup solution out there. The thing about SolarWinds backup, is that if they say it backed it up successfully, I know confidently that the data is safe and will be able to be restored if needed. The reliability and the confidence that we have in this product is extremely high. We've had customers have ransomware, data corruption, employees destroy their data, and as long as it's been backed up, I know that we can get it restored back and I know we have nothing to worry about.  

I would rate their ease of use a nine and a half out of ten. It's super easy, very intuitive, and it's very well done. They have a great product.

The standalone and the RMM are priced differently and each have their own dashboard. Once you load from either dashboard into the software, the software itself is the same. This makes backup operations great. It's so easy to manage and you can do it all from within each dashboard. The difference between the 2 models is one is priced per MB and one is per device.

The speed of the restore is dependent on the configuration. With their solution, you can just store it in the Cloud or you can store it in the Cloud and have a local speed vault. The local speed vault is a NAS, SAN, or mapped network storage on the local network. If you have a local speed vault, your restore is going to be as fast as your network is, or as good as your internet connection if you're restoring from the Cloud. They push it up and down as fast as you have a pipe for. There is really no latency in terms of software, and any slowness is going to be from your hardware or your internet connection.

Cloud storage is nice because a lot of places have local backup. Cloud backup also gives you an offsite location that if something happens to your physical site, someone forgets to put a tape in, or your place burns down, you lose all your stuff. The Cloud gives you a secondary place to backup to.

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CO
Works at Enhanced Telecommunications Services

The most valuable feature has been the data backup. That's what I use the most. I use archiving on my business desktop, but I haven't sold archiving to customers. But it's extremely important that Cove provides cloud-based data protection with backup, disaster recovery, and archiving. That is a necessity for my insurance. As an IT company, my insurance would cost more if my backups were not offsite and off-network. And for the same reasons, the cloud-first architecture which keeps backups off of local networks is also very important.

Another very important aspect is that the vendor has multiple data centers worldwide for backups, because of the speed of accessing information.

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David Waletzko - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal at Community Technology Center

The most valuable aspect is the added protection of having a cloud-based backup service. It provides redundancy in case of data loss. The fact that it includes backup, disaster recovery, and archiving is very important for the assurance that there is another source of data retention and for data restoration in case of a disaster.

Also, the reputation of the vendor and the assurance that the data would be spread across multiple servers are important.

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SB
RMM Manager at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

The solution's most valuable features are bare metal recovery, standby image, failover in Azure, and failover in Hyper-V. The documentation of the protection part with the solution can help its end users look at how they can take care of their own data protection for documents.

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Pieter Sadie - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Manager at PAV Telecoms

This must be one of the easiest backup products to install EVER! Just execute ONE command on a workstation. No Prompts, No confirmations, Nothing  to setup and configure. And then it just works!! A true set and forget solution.

Also, this is one of few databases that allow us to backup MySQL databases, most others only support Microsoft SQL. This solution also has a very user-friendly interface accessed through a web browser. Additionally, backups can be easily configured through N-able Backup.

Another great thing is that files can be restored in mere seconds! The solution backs up only the bits in the files that have been modified allowing us to store a lot of data within the backups without taking up a lot of storage space.

My final favourite feature is where you can set up a Hyper-V machine in continuous restore mode that matches a live VM. 

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DW
President at Tech Help Group, Inc.

The most valuable feature is that it's hands-off. I log in every morning and there are pre-canned filters that I've created to make my life easier. I have something called server status color bars, and that gives me all the servers and, in a nutshell, I can see

  • if any errors are being reported
  • when the last backup was
  • if one is not working, should there be one, and it literally jumps off the page.

You know right away that there's a problem, and that's accomplished through the filtering capabilities, because you can save a filter. Once it's set, you can even duplicate it and then change the parameters and create another filter. It's almost like using tags, but it's allowing you to see the information you want on the screen.

It literally takes me two seconds to understand, without even looking at alerts that have been generated, and to instantaneously have peace of mind that everything was backed up.

And If there's a problem, it's very quick to resolve.

It's also one of the easiest solutions I've used. In fact, out of the entire SolarWinds stack—next to the RMM solution, which is a very mature enterprise-ready solution—SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery is in its own class. It just works.

In addition, the solution provides a single dashboard for all types of data protection. And the single pane of glass gives you status.

It also reports and sends out email alerts, functions that are pretty simple to set up.

When we need to restore a file, we don't even have to remote into our client's system. We just log in to the system management, connect to that machine's Backup Manager remotely, and choose the file. If you know the exact file name you do a search and you can see all the files that have been backed up and when they were last backed up. We choose the most recent one, restore, and then say, "Okay, check to see if the file opens." It works that quickly.

In terms of the efficiency of the solution’s resource and bandwidth use, when you first load the client onto a server, you have the option of seeding the backup onto a local drive and then sending that drive to them for them to seed the backup, and then continue the backup. We don't do it that way. Most of our clients have modern internet bandwidth upload speeds that are very high. We've never had limitations in terms of upload speeds with SolarWinds. So we just kick off the backup and we don't limit bandwidth. It has really been very quick. With most of the server systems that we deal with, the upload is very quick.

The cloud storage, wherever it's backing up to, is happening behind the scenes and you really don't realize it. It basically just starts backing up to the cloud until it's done.

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MH
Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The fact that I have a single pane of glass that I can look at in the morning and I can look at 80 plus instances in, probably more than 80 now, in under five minutes, I can verify that everything's current, that's a great advantage. If it isn't current, I can understand in a second why it's not current and dispatch out, either tickets to my guys to fix something or an email to a customer to please give us access to a couple of servers that we don't have access to.

There is a very, very small learning curve. It's kind of like getting a new car. Once you get the muscle memory going, its piece of cake. It was just a couple of things that switching over from our in-house product to their product took a little bit of getting used to, however, it was pretty simple. I asked a bunch of questions like, Hey, what do I do for this? How do I find this out or that out? And then, we were good to go.

It's their cloud, it's their storage. I don't have to buy a space on Amazon or Google's cloud and then use their software to push it. That works well for me. This way, I don't have to worry about another option or the opportunity that there might be a credential leak.

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CS
Vice President of Managed Services at Entré Computer Solutions

The most valuable feature is the recovery piece itself. Our ability to recover full systems correctly and properly the first time is what makes SolarWinds our most important piece.

The overall ease of use is fantastic. We have people who have very little knowledge who we've been able to teach how to do recoveries. Making things work has been very easy for us.

It provides a single dashboard for all types of data protection, we monitor everything through a single dashboard. It simplifies everything overall. It allows us to see everything, whether passing or failing any issues, any problems through a single pane of glass that we don't have to click through or adjust as we go forward.

We've noticed no difference between managing a simple or a complex backup or recovery, which is another reason why we liked the product so much. There have been no problems or changes as far as speed goes. We think that it's definitely an adequate or amount of time to recover those situations.

The efficiency of the resource and bandwidth use when it comes to both backup and recovery has been excellent at this point. We have not noticed any problems, issues, or changes within bandwidth and our ability to manipulate the amount of bandwidth that's taken at any point in time is another great feature.

The cloud storage feature has made us much more efficient, as well as profitable because of the ways that the software changes and deduplicates the amount of storage that is used at any point in time.

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MB
System engineer and IT support technician at a mining and metals company with 11-50 employees

The product is simple to use and manage. The customers have access to verify the backups.

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it_user597780 - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner

Speed of transfer and upload to the cloud, excellent monitoring.

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JT
Managing Director at Moser Consulting

The most valuables feature is the alerts and monitoring that catches the failed backups.

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MB
Director/Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The most valuable feature is the automation.

The monitoring makes it very easy to check whether a backup has gone bad.

The performance has been pretty good.

The recoverability seems to be fairly good.

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Buyer's Guide
N-able Cove Data Protection
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about N-able Cove Data Protection. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.