Top 5 Offsite Backup Solutions in 2024

There are different backup solutions on the market today, allowing organizations to find the best fit for their needs. At the same time, the large number of solutions makes it difficult to choose the right one for your organization.

One of the most in-demand features across organizations is offsite backup since it helps ensure recoverability in case of a disaster or ransomware attack. In this post, we cover the top 5 backup solutions that support offsite backup and how they can work for your specific infrastructure.

How to Choose the Best Offsite Backup Service

Each organization has a specific IT infrastructure with different components, platforms, and configurations. When choosing among the offsite backup solutions available, pay attention to the following features and capabilities:

• Supported offsite backup locations: remote site or datacenter, public clouds, the cloud storage of a backup vendor, etc.
• Platforms that can be protected. The more platforms are supported, the more flexibility you have. The environment can change with time, for example, you can add Linux servers, VMware virtual machines, or cloud services. If a backup solution supports a variety of platforms, you don’t need to change this solution after changing the infrastructure.
• Recovery capabilities. Consider features such as file recovery, bare metal image-based recovery, application object recovery, database recovery, etc. The more recovery options are supported by a backup solution, the more flexibility you have when restoring data.
• Performance optimization. These features can include incremental backup, compression, deduplication, and other methods of transferring data for a certain platform or technology.
• Security. Unauthorized parties must not access your data during data transfer and in backup storage. Pay attention to data encryption and ransomware protection features. Backup to a mountable storage medium (offline or air-gapped storage) and storage with immutability provide you with excellent security options.

Let’s now jump to our review section with the 5 best offsite backup solutions that include such features.

Backblaze

Backblaze is adopted for offsite backup, with a focus on backup to the cloud. Backblaze was founded in 2007 and released the first implementation of a backup solution in 2008. The solution is attractive due to its affordability and ease of use.

Supported platforms for backup

• Physical: Windows, macOS, including files on attached USB drives
• Image backup: No

The Backblaze backup solution can protect files on Windows and Mac computers but without the ability to restore the entire bootable system from an image.

Deployment

A backup application for Windows and macOS can be installed on the computer for which you want to create an offsite cloud backup. Users need to configure backup parameters after installing this backup application. By default, all files, except some system directories, are backed up. You can deselect files, but these options are limited, and it is impossible to deselect some standard Windows directories such as My Documents or My Pictures. It is possible, though, to select or deselect file types.

Alternatively, you can use a web interface by visiting the official website and uploading the needed files to the cloud manually. Restore is available only from the web interface on the Backblaze website. Backblaze B2 can back up all files from a computer, but image-level backup is not supported.

Customer audience

Organizations and individuals that need to back up data from computers to the cloud to retain offsite cloud backups.

Backup locations

There is one backup location for offsite storage, and that is Backblaze’s own cloud platform.

Storage limits: No

Scheduling and retention

There are two main scheduling approaches:

• After writing changes to the disks
• By using configured backup time intervals

Retention settings: 30 versions (max.), 30 days (max.)

The Backblaze application allows you to back up files once the application detects that they were changed or new files were written. This approach can ensure near-continuous data protection. However, keep in mind that unwanted network load can take place when the network is needed for other work tasks. Manually configuring backup intervals in scheduling options allows you to set backup jobs when they do not overload a computer and network.

Note that this is a backup tool, and there are no synchronization options, such as in OneDrive, for instance.

Security

• Encrypted backups
• Encryption: TSL / SSL, AES-256, 2048-bit public/private keys
• Two-factor authentication to log in to the web interface of the solution

You can use your own encryption keys to store data in a BackBlaze cloud. Thus, you can ensure that any third party cannot open your files protected by encryption keys. Remember that if you lose your own key, Backblaze will not be able to restore your files from the cloud.

Pricing options

Pricing options are flexible and include monthly, one-year, and two-year payment options.

Pricing for backup of computers starts at $9 per month or $99 per year, with a license required for each computer. For example, to protect 5 computers, you need to pay $495 per year. You can transfer a license from one computer to another if the priorities of what computer to protect change.

You can share your files by using the Backblaze B2 service, which is used in addition to the main Backblaze service. By default, users get 10 GB of B2 storage and 1 GB of traffic to download data from B2 for free. Users who need more must pay $0.005 per GB or, for the increased download capacity, $0.01 per GB per month.

If you want to increase the retention period beyond the default 30-day period, you have to pay additional costs between $2 per month or $24 per year, depending on the selected subscription plan. For the unlimited retention plan, you must pay an additional $0.005 for file versions changed more than a year ago.

• Free trial: Yes. A 15-day free trial with the full feature capacity. A bank card is not required.
• Support: 24/7 via email, live chat, and phone.

Advantages

• Available for a wide audience
• Affordable price
• Unlimited storage
• Strong security

Disadvantages

• Installing a backup application on Linux is not supported
• Only its own Backblaze cloud can be a backup destination
• Limited options for backup applications
• No recovery from an image to restore a bootable operating system

Summary

Backblaze is a cost-effective offsite backup solution that provides its own offsite cloud storage to store backups. Unlimited backup storage is an attractive option. Taking into account the price, the solution provides a great value/price ratio. A backup application for Windows and macOS is provided. However, Linux is not supported, and other backup destination types are not supported.

Altaro

If you need to back up more than physical Windows machines and macOS computers, then a data protection solution from Altaro can do the job. The company, founded in 2009, started with a solution to back up virtual machines. Following version 9, the backup solution was sold to HornetSecurity. This fact caused many comments from customers and hot discussions in the community.

The Altaro data protection solution includes multiple products, each designed for a specified purpose:

• Altaro VM Backup & Replication
• Altaro Office 365 Backup
• Altaro Windows Server Backup

Multi-tenant deployment:

• Altaro Endpoint Backup for MSPs
• Altaro Windows Server Backup for MSPs
• Altaro Virtual Machine Backup for MSPs
• Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs

Altaro Cloud Management Console is a special software for centralized view to manage customers for managed service providers in the multi-tenant deployment model.

Supported platforms for backup

The Altaro solution can protect the following types of data:

• VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs
• Microsoft 365
• Physical Windows servers

Note that depending on the protected sources, you need to install the appropriate Altaro product provided by a suite of Altaro data protection solutions.

VM backup is image-based and is performed at the hypervisor level. VM replication is supported.

Customer audience

• Organizations, all-size businesses, and managed service providers (MSPs)
• Customers who need to protect physical Windows servers, VMware or Hyper-V virtual environments, and Office 365 data.

Backup locations

Below is a list of supported backup locations, including locations that can be configured as offsite locations:

• Local Windows computers with local storage and external USB storage
• Remote (offsite) Windows backup servers
• File servers and NAS devices using a UNC path (SMB 3.0 is supported)
• Amazon S3
• Wasabi
• Azure Cloud Storage
• RDX hard disk drive cartridges

The Altaro Offsite Server tool must be installed on offsite machines to configure offsite backup. You must have an Amazon account, Wasabi account, or Microsoft Azure account to back up data to these cloud storage platforms. Altaro doesn’t have its own cloud.

You can back up your data to multiple offsite locations for a higher level of protection. Unfortunately, backup to tape is not supported. NTFS and ReFS target storage partitions for backups are supported.

Deployment

The Altaro software products can be installed only on Windows — such as VM Backup, Management Tools UI, and Offsite Backup Server. The installation process is straightforward and is performed with the installation wizard for Windows. The graphical user interface is provided in the Windows GUI of the installed application, not in the web interface. Operation management in the GUI supports Drag & Drop. You can install the product components in different locations on-premises and offsite.

Scheduling and retention

The Altaro backup solution supports multiple scheduling and retention options that allow you to automate backup processes. You can configure backup jobs to run daily, weekly, and monthly at the selected time.

Retention settings also allow you to select when a recovery point will be deleted from a backup. In addition, grandfather-father-son (GFS) archiving for local backups is available.

Security and ransomware protection

• Encryption: AES encryption for backups. You can set a master AES-256 encryption key to protect backups from reading data by a third party.
• Immutable storage: Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Wasabi.
• Backup to tape is not supported.

Additional features

Let’s look at the features that make the Altaro backup solution worth your attention:

• Deduplication before and after transferring data over the network
• Near-continuous data protection — VM replication every 5 minutes
• VM boot from a backup
• P2V recovery (recover a physical Windows Server from a backup to a VM)
• File-level restore (including Microsoft Exchange objects)
• Volume Shadow Copy support for live VM backup
• VMware and Hyper-V cluster support
• Full, differential, incremental backups
• Concurrent tasks
• Backup test

Pricing options

There are three main editions:

• Standard: €485 per host, Max 5 VMs per host
• Unlimited: €595 per host, Unlimited VMs per host
• Unlimited Plus: €765 per host, Unlimited VMs per host

Keep in mind also the following options:

• Free edition: Yes.

There is also a free edition of Altaro VM backup that allows you to back up 2 VMs per host forever.

• Free Trial: Yes, 30-day trial.

There is a free trial installer of each Altaro backup solution component, including multi-tenant editions for MSPs.

• Support: 24/7 via email and phone
• Licenses: Perpetual and subscription

While most products are switching to the subscription licensing scheme, Altaro provides a choice between a perpetual license and an annual subscription.

• A perpetual license must be bought for a physical server, and it doesn’t depend on the number of sockets and installed processors.
• A subscription license can provide lower upfront costs, but the price is based on the number of protected VMs. VMs are not tied to a host.

See the official page with Altaro pricing and editions to see the list of all features and find the differences between supported features for each edition. A price calculator on the pricing page can help you to estimate the price for your configuration.

The pricing for Office 365 backup is subscription-based and depends on the number of protected Microsoft Office 365 users. For example, a subscription price to protect 10 Microsoft 365 users for one year with Altaro costs €348. A 2-year or 3-year subscription gives you a discount.

Altaro Physical Server Backup can be downloaded and used for free to protect Windows servers.

Advantages

• Provides useful features
• Great free edition and free trial options
• A variety of scheduling options
• A variety of configuration options

Disadvantages

• Installing on Linux is not supported
• Backup of physical Linux machines is not supported
• There is no tape backup that may be important for enterprise organizations
• No physical server image recovery (bare-metal recovery) — only recovery to a VM
• There are questions regarding slow performance after updating to v9

Summary

The Altaro Backup solution is suitable for organizations that use VMware or Hyper-V virtual machines intensively and have physical Windows servers to protect. Support for Microsoft 365 backup is a benefit nowadays because this service is quite popular. The fact that the most authoritative clouds, such as Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, are supported is a positive. VM replication is useful for disaster recovery. Unfortunately, there is a lack of cross-platform support. Linux machines cannot be backed up, and Altaro software components cannot be installed on Linux. The full recovery of a Windows server from an image to boot from a recovered system is not supported.

The high number of components can be challenging for new users to deploy. The Altaro data protection solution can be interesting for those who think that solutions such as Backblaze do not provide enough features for their environment.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a data protection solution that can be used in a high number of data protection scenarios, including offsite cloud backup. One of the younger and more dynamic vendors, with the company founded in 2012, the product has quickly evolved and competes effectively with other top vendors. You can find especially useful and even unique data protection features.

Supported platforms for backup

NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports a variety of platforms:

• Virtual: VMware vSphere VMs, Microsoft Hyper-V VMs, Nutanix, VMware Cloud Director
• Physical: Windows and Linux servers and workstations
• File shares: SMB and NFS
• Amazon EC2 instances
• Microsoft 365: Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams
• Oracle backup with RMAN
• MS SQL Servers (as physical and virtual machines with granular recovery of databases and DB objects)

To protect a physical machine, a Transporter must be installed as a backup agent on a protected machine. Backup and replication of VMs are performed on a hypervisor level via the hypervisor’s APIs. The result is an image-level backup.

Customer audience

Small, medium, and large businesses, enterprise organizations, and managed service providers. Individual customers (non-organizations) are not supported.

Backup locations

The list of supported backup locations includes:

• Local physical or virtual machines where the Transporter can be installed (Linux, Windows).
• VMs in the cloud (Azure VMs, Amazon EC2 instances, for instance)
• SMB or NFS file shares
• Amazon S3 and S3-compatible storage (Wasabi)
• Azure Blob Storage
• Backblaze B2
• Tape (native backup copy to tape)

Support for the Backblaze B2 cloud mentioned in this article before is a great feature. If you have been using Backblaze backup services and decided to deploy NAKIVO Backup & Replication for any reason, you can integrate your existing backup location in the Backblaze Cloud and back up your data with the NAKIVO solution to this cloud. NAKIVO doesn’t have its own cloud to store backups of customers.

Deployment

The architecture of NAKIVO Backup & Replication contains three components:

• Director — is a central component with a web interface for managing the whole solution. One instance of Director is required.
• Transporter — is a component responsible for data transferring and data handling jobs such as backup, recovery, compression, encryption, etc. Multiple Transporters can be installed.
• Backup repository — is where backups are stored. There is a native backup repository in NAKIVO’s own format. Multiple backup repositories can be configured for a product deployment. A backup repository can be installed on a machine with the installed Transporter.

The NAKIVO components are written in Java and C++, giving the solution multi-platform capabilities. As a result, the NAKIVO solution can be deployed on a large number of platforms:

• Physical and virtual Windows and Linux machines
• A virtual appliance (a VMware VM with pre-installed components)
• NAS devices
• Raspberry Pi
• TrueNAS

The deployment process is straightforward, even on Linux and NAS. The installer is made in a wizard style where you need to set a location, the needed components, and some network parameters. There is no need for manual configuration of a database or other stuff.

Management of backup operations is performed in a single pane of glass — you don’t need to install separate applications on a backup server to back up physical machines, Office 365, VMware VMs, etc. Installing a Transporter on a physical machine, NAS, a VM in the public cloud, etc., may be needed in some scenarios.

Using only three components in the NAKIVO solution makes deployment easier compared to other solutions and flexible to meet the topology of the infrastructure in different organizations.

The web interface is intuitive, user-friendly, and fast.

There is a multi-tenant deployment model with a self-service portal and MSP console for managed service providers. There are tenant resource allocation and branding options.

Scheduling and retention

Scheduling and retention settings are detailed and flexible.

Advanced scheduling options include job chaining and provide a high level of automation.

The Calendar dashboard is used to check scheduled tasks and avoid task overlap.

The grandfather-father-son retention scheme is supported. Additionally, the new advanced retention approach was recently added (in v.10.8). The new approach allows you to create retention rules and configure retention policies more flexibly in a predictable and clear manner. The new retention approach was released to provide more control. There is the ability to set the expiration date for recovery points.

The maximum limits are up to 4000 recovery points for a backup and 40 recovery points for VM replicas.

Security and ransomware protection

• Encryption: AES-256 in flight and at rest (during data transferring and in backup repositories)
• A backup repository with immutability on a machine with a Linux Transporter (onsite and offsite)
• Amazon S3 object lock (the Write-Once-Read-Many technology) and S3-compatible WORM storage such as Wasabi
• Backup copy to tape
• Backup repository detach can be used to unmount and disconnect disk storage devices
• Backup malware scan
• Two-factor authentication using email or Google Authenticator
• Role-based access control

Additional features

The list of features of NAKIVO Backup & Replication is long:

• Site Recovery — configuring complex and automated disaster recovery scenarios; disaster recovery testing
• Compression of backup data; excluding swap files and partitions from backups
• Global deduplication and integration with deduplication appliances (Dell EMC DD Boost, HPE StoreOnce, NEC HYDRAstor)
• Real-time VMware VM replication (Beta)
• Active full, synthetic full, and incremental backups
• Policy-based backups
• Backup and replication of VMs in VMware and Hyper-V clusters
• Backup copy
• Instant backup verification and reporting
• VMware infrastructure monitoring
• Application-aware backup (Windows and Linux workloads)
• Universal file and object recovery: Active Directory objects, MS SQL Server objects, MS Exchange objects
• Instant VM, object, and file recovery
• Cross-platform recovery (backup export)
• Multi-tenant deployment with self-service portal for MSPs

Physical server and workstation recovery is image-based and is performed by writing a rescue ISO image on a media and booting from this media to recover the entire bootable OS and files.

See the full list of features and supported editions on the NAKIVO feature page.

Pricing options

Two pricing models are supported: Perpetual and subscription-based. The advantages of Perpetual licensing are the indefinite use after buying a license and a 1-year of support. The advantage of a subscription is receiving the latest updates of the product during the subscription period.

There are five editions of NAKIVO Backup & Replication:

• Pro Essentials
• Pro (a custom number of protected items with the features of Pro Essentials)
• Enterprise Essentials
• Enterprise (a custom number of protected items with the features of Enterprise Essentials)
• Enterprise Plus

The most affordable plan is Pro Essentials. For Perpetual licensing, the price starts at:

• VM protection: $229 per socket (on a physical server used as a hypervisor)
• Physical servers: $58 per server
• Physical workstations: $19 per workstation
• File shares: $149 per TB of protected data
• Oracle: $165 per database (Enterprise Plus only)
• VMware monitoring: $100 per socket
• Real-time replication: $550 per socket (Enterprise Essentials and higher)

Microsoft 365 backup is available only on a subscription basis.

The subscription price starts at:

• Microsoft 365: $0.80 per user/month
• All workloads: $1.95 per workload/month
• Monitoring for VMware vSphere: $0.90 per workload/month
• Real-time replication: $2.35 per workload/month (Enterprise Essentials and higher)

A workload can be a virtual machine, a physical server, 3 workstations, 0.5 TB for file shares, Oracle database.

• Free Edition: Yes
• Free Trial: Yes, 15 days

A bank account is not required to download a free trial version with all features enabled. It is enough to enter your email and phone without registration or sending special requests.

Free Edition works for 1 year and protects 10 workloads, 5 Office 365 users and monitors 10 VMware VMs.

The pricing options may seem complex at first glance, but they provide flexibility when requesting a license to buy. You can use the NAKIVO pricing calculator to estimate the price to protect data in your environment.

Advantages

• A wide list of supported source items to protect and destination locations to store backups
• Can be installed on a wide range of platforms
• Ease of use
• A graphical user interface is intuitive and user-friendly
• The NAKIVO command line interface for scripting and task automation in the NAKIVO solution
• Most attractive pricing policy for SMBs
• Clear documentation and support materials

Disadvantages

• A trial version works only for 15 days
• Strict limitations of the Free Edition
• The GUI is designed for large wide-screen monitors
• Backup of Google Cloud Services is not supported
• The licensing is difficult to navigate at first

Summary

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an excellent data protection solution due to its high level of reliability, an extended set of features, and supported source/destination platforms. Despite the fact that there is no its own NAKIVO cloud, there are many supported offsite locations and cloud platforms to store backups. Global search makes data protection more convenient in large environments with a high number of VMs. All these factors make it possible to consider NAKIVO Backup & Replication as one of the best offsite backup solutions in terms of the value you get for the money, especially for budget-conscious organizations.

Unitrends

Unitrends backup software is another data protection solution for organizations. The company behind this backup solution was founded in 2004 (powered by Kaseya). The solution provides more features for offsite backup compared to Backblaze and can be used as a stronger alternative to Altaro.

Supported platforms to back up

• Virtual machines: VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer (backup and replication)
• Office 365: Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Calendar
• NAS backup: NDMP and file level
• MS SQL Server and Oracle
• Nutanix
• Physical Windows Server and workstations, Linux machines (image-based)
• macOS file backup
• MySQL file backup
• AWS EC2

Customer audience

Medium and large businesses and enterprises, in addition to a partnership program for MSPs.

Backup locations

• Locally attached disks on backup servers, iSCSI shared storage
• SMB, NFS share
• Backup archiving to tape
• AWS EC2, Azure VM public clouds where Unitrends components are deployed
• Unitrends Forever Cloud Storage

You can configure archiving and synchronization for remote locations. It is possible to configure synchronization between two Unitrends appliances. Archiving is useful for offsite backup.

Unitrends also provides a cloud backup storage solution called Forever Cloud (similar to Backblaze, which also offers its own cloud). You can store backups in three different locations with Unitrends, including having an offsite cloud backup, and respect the 3–2–1 backup rule.

Deployment

This product can be deployed as a virtual appliance in VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, or XenServer in the local virtual infrastructure as well as in AWS or Microsoft Azure in the public cloud. A Linux-based virtual appliance doesn’t require a Windows license.

The components of three roles can be deployed according to the architecture of the Unitrends backup solution:

• Management (M) role — managing a single environment, such as a couple of vCenter servers.
• Engine (E) role — heavy work processing, such as backup, recovery, compression, and deduplication.
• Presentation (P) role — the master view to manage multiple environments in the same interface.

Alternatively, Unitrends provides a physical hardware appliance with installed software components of the Unitrends data protection solution.

The HTML5 web interface is fast and responsive. The user interface is quite functional but can use some improvement to be more user-friendly.

Unitrends provides a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) option for offsite cloud backup.

Scheduling and retention

Scheduling allows you to automate backup jobs and achieve small RPO:

• Near continuous data protection with 1-minute backup intervals

The retention options are:

• Per VM retention settings
• Keep recent, days, weeks, months, years

Security and ransomware protection

• Encryption: AES-256
• Backup immutability in the immutable cloud by Unitrends
• Backup copy to tape
• Unitrends Ransomware Detection during a backup process (predictive analytics)

You can set the encryption passphrase and back up a master key used for encryption.

Additional features

Unitrends provides a set of useful features, including:

• Adaptive inline deduplication and compression
• Application-aware backup (using VSS for MS SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, and other applications)
• Full and incremental backups (with chain settings, forever-incremental backup is supported)
• Backup copy
• Backup testing
• Granular recovery: MS SQL database objects, Exchange, individual files
• Disaster recovery + DR testing and reporting; automated failover
• Flexible recovery options
• Supports VMs in vSphere clusters
• Bare-metal recovery: Windows, Linux
• Instant VM recovery

The full list of features is displayed on the official website.

The Unitrends solution writes the ISO bootable rescue image that you can write on a bootable device, boot and recover the entire physical machine with a bootable operating system.

Monitoring of the backup appliance is implemented with a Nagios plug-in using the Unitrends REST API and PowerShell Toolkit.

Pricing options

The price per server or socket is set for a perpetual license.

• Software Editions:
• Essentials $349 (up to 10 protected resources)
• Standard $549
• Software and Hardware editions:
• Enterprise $1099
• Enterprise Plus $1699

Software and hardware editions also include hardware provided together with Unitrends backup software as a hardware appliance. You can compare this with legacy Unitrends editions.

• Support: Yes, 24/7 support
• Free trial: Yes, 30 days
• Free edition: Withdrawn

To order a 30-day free trial version, you need to make a request, book a meeting to contact a Unitrends specialist to approve your request, and get a 30-day trial version.

The pricing policy for this solution is strict, which can be a barrier for potential customers. The price can be unattractive for small and medium businesses.

You can use a pricing calculator on the Unitrends website to estimate the costs you would spend for backup to the cloud.

Advantages

• Reliable backups
• Good integration with VMware environments
• Informative reports about protected data
• Backup to external hard drives
• Granular recovery options

Disadvantages

• The price may be relatively high
• A free edition is not available
• If errors occur, the error messages are not informative
• Issues with access to the official website
• Active Directory integration could be better

Summary

The Unitrends data protection solution can be chosen by organizations where the number of VMs increased significantly (1000+), and the previous data protection solution doesn’t fit well after that. The number of features is more than average. Some users may think that some features are missing. Unitrends is a reliable data protection solution, but not for the lowest price.

Having its own cloud to store offsite backup is a nice option for offsite cloud backup, but support for more top public cloud storage platforms would be appreciated. Uninformative error messages make troubleshooting difficult and assistance of tech support may be needed.

Vembu BDR Suite

Vembu BDR Suite is one more data protection solution that is focused on backup and disaster recovery for organizations using different physical and virtual environments. The company was founded in 2002 and is specialized in developing a data protection solution.

All backup components of Vembu BDR Suite are:

• BDR Backup Server — is the main component.
• Storage Repository — is a component responsible for storing backups.
• Backup Proxy — is a component that should be installed on the source (protected) system to process the backup data and use encryption for data transferring.
• Offsite DR Server- for offsite backup, you need to install BDRSuite Offsite DR Server on a remote site or on a VM in the public cloud (Windows/Linux).
• CloudDR — is a disaster recovery server based on the cloud that handles a backup copy of backup server data stored offsite.
• Vembu Universal Explorer — is a tool for granular data recovery of Microsoft application objects of MS SQL Server, Exchange, Active Directory, and SharePoint.

Supported platforms to back up

Vembu supports a wide range of platforms to protect:

• Virtual: VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V (backup and replication), KVM
• Physical: Windows (servers and workstations), Linux, and macOS — disk image and file backup
• Office 365: SharePoint Online, Teams, Exchange Online, Contacts, Calendar, OneDrive
• Cloud: Amazon EC2 instances, Azure VMs, Google Cloud VMs, and Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Google Drive, Contacts, etc.)
• File share backup (SMB)

The backup of virtual machines is image-based and performed on the hypervisor level.

Supported Microsoft file systems: NTFS, ReFS

To recover the entire physical machines (bare metal recovery), Vembu writes a bootable rescue ISO image that should be burned on a DVD media. After loading from a rescue media, you can restore the entire server from an image-based backup.

Customer audience

Organizations of all sizes that use physical and virtual environments as well as public cloud services. There is a partnership program for managed service providers.

Backup locations

Vembu supports multiple backup locations, including offsite cloud storage:

• Local drives on local or remote machines.
• A remote file server or NAS (SMB, NFS)
• Cloud: Amazon S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud, Wasabi.
• Backup to tape
• Vembu Cloud

Vembu BDR Cloud Storage is Vembu’s own cloud maintained by Vembu. You can buy storage space and configure Vembu BDR to use this offsite cloud storage to store backups.

Deployment

Vembu BDR Suite can be installed on Windows Server 2012 R2 and newer Windows Server versions. You should download the installer from the official website first. Installation on Linux is also possible. A script must be used to download and run the Linux installer. The installer asks you to define a storage pool size for a backup repository. It could be more customizable, but this option is useful anyway.

The installation process on Windows is straightforward and is performed in the installation wizard. You need to create a user account to log in to the Vembu solution and set the Postgres database options. This database will be used as a part of the operation of the data protection solution.

After deployment, you should visit the online BDR Suite Portal. This is where registered Vembu customers can manage all registered instances of the Vembu data protection solution. Vembu BDR suite is managed via the local web interface deployed on a physical or virtual machine in an organization.

An agent must be installed on physical machines that you want to back up.

Alternatives to installing Vembu manually if you need to deploy a solution on a virtual machine:

• VMware virtual appliance
• Hyper-V virtual appliance

A virtual appliance is based on Ubuntu with the GUI. This deployment method is based on deploying a VM with Vembu BDR Server installed from a VM template.

Multi-tenant deployment is supported.

Scheduling and retention

There are wide scheduling options:

• Run Every / Run Daily / Run Weekly / Run Continuous / Run Once
• GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) retention scheme

Simple and advanced retention options are available. In the advanced mode, you can perform daily merge, weekly merge, and monthly merge.

Security and ransomware protection

A wide set of features can help to protect backups against unauthorized access and modification by ransomware:

• Encryption: AES-256 during transmission and in backup repositories
• Two-factor authentication (via email)
• Backup to tape
• Backup to air-gapped storage
• Offsite backup to remote devices
• Backup to immutable storage
• Backup to cloud: Amazon S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud
• Hardened Linux repositories

Additional features

Vembu provides many attractive features:

• Backup types: Active full, synthetic full, incremental
• Parallel VM processing and multi-host backup — backup of multiple VMs/virtual disks or hosts
• Install Boot Live Migration — boot a VM directly from a backup
• Rotated drives as a backup repository — is useful for data backup to external drives
• Application-aware backup
• Application object recovery: Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, and Active Directory.
• File recovery
• Office 365 object recovery
• Backup migration between platforms — supports restoring Hyper-V VMs to VMware vSphere and vice versa
• The VembuHIVE file system is used to store Vembu backups in backup repositories
• Deduplication (own and backup appliances)
• Backup verification: Boot Check, Mount Check, Data Integrity Check
• Near-continuous data protection (replication with 15-min intervals)
• Backup copy

The most exciting features are displayed in this list to avoid overloading the article. You can familiarize yourself with all Vembu features on the official Vembu feature page.

Vembu BDR 360 is a monitoring tool to monitor the infrastructure centrally. This tool can send email notifications to administrators and display reports.

Pricing options

Vemby is available in three main editions:

• Standard edition
• Enterprise edition
• Free edition

With the Free edition, users can back up 10 virtual machines, 10 EC2 instances, 10 workstations, 10 Office 365 users, or 10 Google Workspace users. A Free edition can be activated after the trial expires or at any time. The capabilities of the Free Edition are great, and the number of protected items is not low.

• Trial: Yes, a 30-day free trial (full-featured)

You can find all current pricing details on the official Vembu pricing page.

The pricing options for Vembu as an offsite cloud backup solution are more complex than for Backblaze and Altaro. Subscription and perpetual pricing models are supported. However, the price for each edition is based on the type of data to back up, such as physical machines, virtual machines, Microsoft 365, etc.

As for the perpetual licensing scheme, the pricing (for the Standard edition) starts at:

• $432 per socket of a hypervisor server for VM backup or $90 per VM

As for subscription, the pricing starts at:

• $216 per socket for VM backup or $36 per VM

It is important to emphasize that there is an additional payment for using BDRSuite Offsite DR Server, which is a component required to back up data to offsite backup repositories. The BDRSuite Offsite DR add-on transforms Vembu into a complete offsite cloud backup solution.

• A Perpetual license starts at $180 per socket or $90 per VM.
• A subscription license starts at $90 per socket or $15 per VM.

To use a native Vembu public cloud storage, you need to pay. The cost for BDRCloud Storage is $0.06 / GB / month.

The licensing scheme seems complex but provides enough granularity.

• Support: 24/7

Advantages

• Support of a high number of source platforms to protect
• A wide list of supported platforms
• A wide list of destination locations to store backups and VM replicas
• The number of protected items for Free Edition

Disadvantages

• A user interface could be more logical
• Not enough command line capabilities to use scripts for task automation
• Documentation could be improved
• A high number of components can be confusing for new users

Summary

Vembu BDR Suite provides a wide set of useful features that is larger than for Altaro or Unitrends and supports more platforms. The Vembu solution is preferable if you need more than just VM backup. Similarly to Backblaze, Vembu maintains its own public cloud that can be used as the destination to store offsite backups. In general, the product left good impressions and can be used by organizations who think that previously reviewed solutions provide insufficient features.

Conclusion

All five offsite backup solutions mentioned in this review are effective and reliable for backing up data and storing backups in a remote location. Different solutions support different features and environments. You can select any of them based on what you need to protect your infrastructure.