# ShadowProtect Reviews 2026. Verified Reviews, Pros & Cons | Capterra > Is ShadowProtect the right Backup solution for you? Explore 31 verified user reviews from people in industries like yours to make a confident choice. Source: https://www.capterra.com/p/119881/ShadowProtect/reviews --- ShadowProtect 4.4 (31) [View alternatives](https://www.capterra.com/p/119881/ShadowProtect/alternatives/) Provider data verified by our Software Research team, and reviews moderated by our Reviews Verification team. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/our-story/) * * * Last updated March 13th, 2026 # Reviews of ShadowProtect Ease of use 4.1 Customer Service 3.9 ## Showing most helpful reviews Showing 1-25 of 31 Reviews Sort by: Most Helpful Rating Company Size Reviewer's Role Length of Use Frequency of Use David P. Senior Field Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Excellent backup and restore for physical servers" November 7, 2018 5.0 This product has been king of physical server backups for a long time. They have started to bolt-on features to better support virtual environments and recovery, and offer cloud services. Unfortunately these are clearly additions to the base product and not revisions to it, meaning that management is not very slick and it doesn't make commercial sense when stacked against the competition. But if you just have a couple of physical servers and want a robust backup solution with recovery you can rely on, this is a good product. Pros Easy to install and use. Plenty of options for backup routines and destinations. The recovery to same or dissimilar hardware is rock solid. They have a cloud backup offering that is competitively priced. Support is usually good once you engage with them. Most issues come down to something outside the product, i.e. not uninstalling a previously solution first. Once up and running it can be relied upon to produce consistently good backups. Cons Cumbersome to manage multiple backups for multiple servers. The central management tool they offer is still very much a work in progress. Expensive per-server compared a lot of alternative products. The cloud backup runs separately to the main application, giving you another thing to manage. Retention policies are easily broken just by modifying a backup job, which can lead to them being ignored and filling storage. Review Source Response from Arcserve December 7, 2018 David - many thanks for your feedback - it is greatly appreciated. We're excited to share our new product ShadowXafe which addresses several of your product observations. Our team will be in touch with you soon. Never hesitate to reach out to me at connie.whiteside@storagecraft.com Regards, Connie Whiteside Sr Director Customer Success RP Rob P. CEO Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "ShadowProtect SPX has always come through when we have needed it " July 21, 2022 4.0 Pros We have had success with ShadowProtect in some tough circumstances and it has come through with flying colors when have needed it most. Mount failed storage arrays from backup and up and running in minutes after diagnosing issue. Boot failed servers to virtual machines - yep done it and worked great. Restored countless deleted files. Cons Managing the product and alerts can get unwieldy in large deployments. The biggest problem is their lack of product support. It can take days to hear back from an engineer and they will likely be a low tier engineer who at best can triage your issue and get it to the right person. They outsourced all of their support to India which is okay if you do it right, but I don't think their staff know the product. We have been some issues with their cloud backups recently and getting an engineer to look at those problems in a timely manner has been a challenge. We have found it more productive to reseed the backup and send it back to the data center than to work with their support. Reason for choosing ShadowProtect We have lots of single servers instances and ShadowProtect was more cost effective than using the Datto BDR in those cases. Switched from [Veritas Backup Exec](https://www.capterra.com/p/231491/Backup-Exec/) Reliability, cloud backups, easy encryption, virtual machine backups. Review Source BT Bob T. Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "\* \* \* DISAPPOINTING SCAM \* \* \* " August 1, 2018 2.0 2+ years before the built in shutdown bomb triggered. Pros Does what I want, when it works, usually 3 days of 6 days scheduled. It errors out without notice when the backup storage external drive doesn't instantly wake up and salute as soon as ShadowProtect pings once. But I can live with 3 full backups every week.....if the software had not self-destructed. Cons During the usual monthly safety check found the screen hobbled. The important buttons (backup, restore, etc.) have been disabled and all others produce a 404 error, webpage cannot be found. Several hours later I gave up on tech support and called SALES. A "tech support" person responded to my message forwarded by Sales. She tried the old "Microsoft Update Error" blame game. As a Visual Basic engineer of 24+ years I know what Windows OS errors produce. It does NOT shut down software in an orderly, selective manner. I told her THIS event was clearly deliberate. She said the software must be uninstalled and replaced by a newer version with their help of course. THREE TIMES I asked what this "newer version" would cost, which she ignored apparently thinking I would have no choice, that my system had blown up or something and I couldn't restore it without paying whatever the price. WRONG ! I have Raid with dual drives and tiers of protective software. Thus, as I can no longer trust my small business data to a software provider which tries to try to leverage existing customers to pay "error motivated ransom" to access the data if needed, I told her she was trying to scam a software pro... and bye bye. Review Source Response from Arcserve August 3, 2018 Hi Bob - thanks for bringing this to our attention. I'm delighted we connected and are able to assist you! As noted, your support maintenance expired 5/31/2017. Going forward, please renew your maintenance so we can continue to provide great technical support. Don't hesitate to contact me at connie.whiteside@storagecraft.com. Regards, Connie LR Lloyd R. Technical Partner Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "ShadowProtect including ImageManager and ShadowStream" October 19, 2022 5.0 Always saved the day when disaster struck so the overall experience is excellent. Pros We are still using the legacy software and we've experienced numerous physical Windows server failures in the past. ShadowProtect has always successfully restored the entire image to the same or different hardware. Cons StorageCraft eventually released an excellent new solution for Hyper-V but it took too long and we had already moved to a competitor. At the moment, we still wouldn't use the new solution because it's suitable for SMBs who have their own servers on-site and most of our customers now use our private cloud solutions because we have our on datacentre servers. Switched from [Acronis True Image](https://www.capterra.com/p/234347/Acronis-True-Image/) ShadowProtect with ImageManager and ShadowStream seemed like a better solution with better features and training at the time but we also lost track of the Acronis features so not sure if they caught up. Review Source MP Mark P. Director Computer & Network Security Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Shadow protect is great for onsite and offsite backup" June 15, 2021 5.0 Only have had restore issues on SBS Servers All other devices have been great in a disaster recovery situation. The product is good and with the new cloud addition, monitoring is so much easier Pros Its very cost effective, been around for years and has a good market share, meaning the reliability of the product is tested well and any bugs are ironed out pretty quick. Cons Installation isnt a few clicks. Need third party hardware to complete a full DR solution Would be great to have an all in one solution with direct support Alternatives considered [Datto SIRIS](https://www.capterra.com/p/148228/Datto/) Reason for choosing ShadowProtect Not all solutions are for all clients environments or budgets. Review Source Jordan D. IT Manager Consumer Goods Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Provides Confidence and Security" October 8, 2018 4.0 StorageCraft's ShadowPortect has saved me many of times. It isn't unheard of for end users to accidentally delete that all important accounting file. With ShadowProtect, recovering missing or deleted files is a breeze, often taking less than 5 minutes to restore a backup of the file. With our backup policy we are able to restore files within minutes of when it was changed, misplaced, or deleted. ShadowProtect also takes care of consolidations and our off-site backups, making it a great disaster recovery tool should a meteor hit our office. Pros Fully Encrypted backups Automated integrity checks continuous backup from system to file supports a number of transport protocols including FTP and SMB Automated backup to VM for almost ready to boot full system backups Cons The full system backups take some work to get to booting state. Still far better than the alternative of starting from scratch. Runs on Windows, which has been the source of some frustration Review Source Nuno O. IT Manager Machinery Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Simple and effective in times of greatest need to recover data!" February 26, 2018 4.0 Data recovery erased by users quickly recovery and with little work donwtime. Very effective backup and error notification chart. Pros Speed in data recovery. GUI simple and clean, with only the necessary functionality. Wizard for creating backup jobs very intuitive. Copy management tool, ImageManager, free of charge.Checks whether backups are actually ok.Assembling backup images is extremely fast, allowing you to recover files in 15-minute periods without much effort or time spent. Cons Help in the ImageManager configuration was not the most effective, very time consuming response. Email notification tool does not always respond. With some errors and setup delay. Review Source Response from Arcserve July 25, 2018 Thanks for the positive feedback Nuno, we're here to make life easier for you! Long may it continue :-) Arthur H. Systems Engineer Used the software for: 2+ years ### "We use this on over 100 servers for our customers and it has worked flawlessly" February 19, 2018 5.0 We use this for almost all of our disaster recovery Pros It is easy to restore a file It is easy to restore to a VM It is quick backup It has minimal performance impact on systems The backup sizes are pretty small Cons Having to install imagemanager on the system to manage the backups is a bit confusing Sometimes the backup chain can be corrupted and you have to engage support to keep from making a new base backup. Review Source Response from Arcserve July 25, 2018 We couldn't have asked for a better review! Thanks so much Arthur, we really appreciate it :-) Robert L. Owner Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "ShadowProtect Works well until it doesn't" September 6, 2022 4.0 Pros Overall shadowProtect works really well. It's quick, it's easy to use. Cons If you have a problem then you might as well forget about getting your data back. Support is really slow, like it could be weeks before you get a real answer to get your data back. Review Source Ivan M. Technical Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "The absolute best in backup and recovery!" May 19, 2018 5.0 They really deliver on the promise of business continuity. We recovered really fast from the ransomware, we didn't use the HIR technology (we determined we didn't need it for the mail server) for setting up a temporary VM for keeping the server up, but it does what it promises. Pros No-nonsense recovery. Let me tell you a story: Some day we were hit by ransomware on our mail server and it was of course inaccessible. We had set up ShadowProtect to make backups weekly during the weekend over a NAS we have. The OS quickly became unbootable after sometime having the ransomware. So we loaded an USB stick with the recovery solution and it was really easy to use. The recovery solution also supports NAS storage so we followed the wizard (we didn't have to check out documentation, it was intuitive to use), selected the latest image, left it overnight reimaging disks (including GPT and MBR headers) and at the morning, we had our server fully working again! Cons It can be pricey, but definitely it's worth the money. It makes you think twice considering there are other tools with similar features and cheaper, but StorageCraft really delivers! So I'd buy again with eyes blindfolded. Review Source Response from Arcserve May 30, 2018 Thank you very much for the terrific feedback, Montilla and for being a valued StorageCraft customer! ME Mujde E. Financial Affairs Manager Logistics and Supply Chain Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Competitive product with lots of options and good support" August 18, 2019 4.0 Pros Easy to use and deploy. Lots of backup schedules and target choices. Once it is up and operating, you can rely on continuously producing excellent backups. They have a competitively priced cloud backup offer. Usually, support is nice once you're involved with them. Cons It is a little bit costly than its alternatives Review Source Response from Arcserve August 19, 2019 Thank you very much for the great review, Mujde VR Verified Reviewer Chief Operating Officer, and HIPAA Privacy Officer Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Although a bit more expensive than similar backup software, ShadowProtect checks all the boxes." March 8, 2018 4.0 The ability to virtual boot a server from a backup, to get a client back up and going while their true server gets replaced. Pros ShadowProtect is a great piece of software. The main draws of this backup utility, are that you can encrypt your backups (which helps comply with HIPAA and other various laws), and perform a virtual boot from the backup media if your server/PC goes down. It's pretty amazing to be able to right-click the file that the backup creates, select "virtualboot", and have a working server up and going in 10 minutes or so. Pretty much a Disaster Recovery dream Cons This software is expensive!! You can get the same functionality from something like Acronis, at a fraction of the cost. But I think ShadowProtect was one of the first that could virtualize. It's a great product, but there are other cheaper options. Review Source Response from Arcserve July 25, 2018 Happy to be checking your boxes, thanks for the great feedback :-) BF Bjoern F. Owner Computer Networking Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Quality and Support has decreased" November 27, 2018 3.0 This used to be a great and reliable software but we've found ourselves spending more time to fix and troubleshoot issues than we should. If every day backups stop working somewhere, I loose confidence in the product. There's other players that offer the same or more features for half the cost and have much more responsive support and less issues. Pros It's a great product when it works. Reliable backups with flexible restore options. Cons The software has many bugs and unexpected issues that make the backups less reliable. We've been spending too much time troubleshooting issues, calling support and often not finding a real fix other than a temporary workaround. The support is really lacking. The response time is horrible. By the time most tickets are responded, you've lost 2-3 days of backups. Restoring full machines is also a painfully slow process unless you can do an instant restore to a VM that reads from the backup storage. Each machine has to be setup with ShadowProtect individually which takes a lot of time. The uninstall of the product fails in most cases and requires a painful procedure to rip out the rest. Review Source Response from Arcserve December 7, 2018 Hi Bjoern - many thanks for your feedback and always great speaking with you. Never hesitate to reach out to me at connie.whiteside@storagecraft.com. Best Regards, Connie Whiteside Sr Director Customer Success David P. CIO Computer & Network Security Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Backups you can trust" February 21, 2019 5.0 With ShadowProtect we are able to backup servers throughout the day. We no longer need to schedule backup windows for each server to avoid flooding a NAS with several backups at the same time. This also means that nights can be devoted to maintenance without interrupting critical backups. Pros My favorite feature is backing up throughout the day without interfering with production Cons Recovering part of a drive (less than everything, but more than 1 folder) can be challenging, especially if you are trying to keep specific security settings in place. Review Source CA Carl A. Network Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Better Options on the Market" February 20, 2020 3.0 Used this as the primary back for our MSP for several years and had a few quirks. The markdown comes from the experience to restore complete backups during a real world incident. We had users on other products that were restored in less than a day. Those under this product took a couple days to receive the offsite backups and restore. Pros The interface is easy enough to understand and navigate. Excellent Training program Certification for Storagecraft Cons The setup of clients can be a bit clunky and there is some terminology unique to only storagecraft The offsite backup product is confirmed, but not actually verified for usability. Review Source Response from Arcserve February 26, 2020 Thanks for the frank review, Carl. We very much appreciate the feedback and it was great that we were able to speak to you directly about the specifics of this situations and the "cons' you listed. We take feedback like yours very seriously, have discussed this internally and will use it to improve our processes moving forward. Thank you again! VR Verified Reviewer Field Service Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "It just works" November 27, 2018 4.0 Pros Easy to setup, clear but informative interface. Plenty of different ways to backup and types of media that data can be backed up to. Can backup physical machines and also virtual applicances. Cons Great for Standalone Physical devices, prefer another product for virtual applicances but that's purely on my preference. Pain having to install imagemanager to manage the backups would be better install 'All in One product' Review Source Response from Arcserve December 7, 2018 We thank you for your review - your feedback is greatly appreciated. Never hesitate to reach out me at connie.whiteside@storagecraft.com. Best Regards, Connie Whiteside Sr Director Customer Success VR Verified Reviewer Computer Technician Computer Networking Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "SMB friendly and scales well" August 2, 2018 4.0 Imaged based server backups. Pretty good stuff. Pros Fairly easy to use once you get the training out of the way. Somewhat intuitive though they did change the interface around at least once on me. Had to restore a few servers in my time that were affected by Ransomware or hardware failure and it always went (relative to the situation) smoothly. Cons Chains. Always the chains. "Check the chains, the chains are broken, corrupted chains over here." Had one server out of the bunch where we couldn't do a bare metal restore but were able to restore the files to a new OS. Probably could have solved it had we enough time but as it was a production server we favored speed over quality in that particular situation. Review Source Response from Arcserve August 3, 2018 Hi there - Connie Whiteside Sr Director Customer Success here - thanks for your feedback! Never hesitate to reach out to me with questions or concerns at connie.whiteside@storagecraft.com Best Regards, Connie VR Verified Reviewer Presales & Technical Support Manager Computer & Network Security Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "A very good choice if you want backup and build a DR plan" August 22, 2018 5.0 We used it to backup servers and implement DR on another site. ShadowProtect is really designed to do just that and it does it very easily and works every time. All recovery method (which are plenty) work also as they should. A very important feature is virtual-boot, from which you can instantly test an image by transforming it to a VM on any machine, eg a powerful laptop with VirtualBox. I'd like it to also be strong in endpoint/workstation area too, but its lack of plain folder/file backup is important. You just can't backup all systems' disks if what you really need is to backup a few locally stored documents. Pros SP is a very good choice if you intend to do backup and DR plan. Some people might bother only with backing up servers or files, but SP really excels in disaster recovery options! ImageManager is a really great tool that comes with the solution which manages and verifies your images. System backup and recovery options are plenty and all work, and this is really important. Cons While it's a pretty much do-it-all solution, it lacks of some features such as single file/folder backup. You only get to backup full images/systems. Also SPX is not really polished as a gui/console, needs some refactoring on the UX area. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer IT Support Technician Law Enforcement Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Shadow Protect" October 15, 2018 5.0 When I needed to do major restores the software worked well Pros I like how easy the software is to use and manage Cons Adding machines and making the agent work on older machines is a little difficult Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Project Delivery Manager Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Server was backup and running in 10 minutes" February 13, 2018 4.0 Pros The power of the ImageManager server is amazing. If for whatever reason we have to take a server down or it crashes, we can have users using their applications or file shares and be none the wiser there is a critical issue. Cons Restoring a large server image from the local server can be a lengthy ordeal even over sfp+. Support is also not the best equipped to help you solve their most common issues encountered and often I would have to wait for my ticket to be elevated to the next tier. Review Source Response from Arcserve July 25, 2018 Delighted to hear you got your server backup and running in ten minutes with StorageCraft - that's what we're all about. Thanks for taking the time to provide a review. Much appreciated :-) Matt I. Owner Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Awesome Backup for Mission Critical Servers" August 8, 2019 5.0 Pros It just works. Backups are fast. Easy to recover information. Use it to create an almost ready virtual machine in the event your server fails. Cons Imagemanager can get out of sync. You must replicate the data elsewhere. Review Source Response from Arcserve August 9, 2019 Thank you for the great review, Matt Kevin Y. Owner/ 1 Man Army Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Great Backup for small business and enterprise server systems." April 2, 2018 5.0 Pros Tons of features Image management options Multiple back schemes make solutions for most storage requirements Very reliable Great reports Works with several different online backup providers Cons Its not cheap, but you get what you pay for. takes a little time to learn the ins and outs of it. Interface isn't the prettiest in the world. Review Source Response from Arcserve July 25, 2018 Appreciate the positive feedback Kevin, thanks! CA Chris A. VP of IT Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Good backup, image based with incremental rollups" January 17, 2018 5.0 Pros Images based incremental rollups that perform disk to disk backups. This does make it faster than some backup technologies but you still need to make sure it is implemented securely and with offsite retention. Cons I have worked with clients that didn't segment the backups properly. Because of this, the technology is very susceptible to ransomware and other network threats. This isn't necessarily a con of the software, but make sure it is implemented securely. Review Source Response from Arcserve July 25, 2018 Thanks for the prudent advice Chris and for the overall review. We really appreciate it :-) VR Verified Reviewer Application Support Team Lead Medical Practice Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Reliable backup software with some neat features" April 17, 2018 4.0 Allows us to rest easy when it comes to clients backups Pros The backups are reliable and the software provides a great deal of flexibility when it comes to backup targets. The restoration options are quite robust and quick to implement in a disaster. Cons Sometimes the infinite incremental chains fail to replicate properly and thus do not consolidate correctly on the local or remote source, requiring manual cleanup. Review Source Response from Arcserve July 25, 2018 Thanks for the 4 and 5 star ratings, it's much appreciated :-) GA Greg A. President Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Easy image backups" June 12, 2019 5.0 Pros Shadow Protect can image backup all partitions, set security on the image, perform full and incremental backups and is an excellent product overall. Cons Not having the ability to image a full disk, can only image partitions. Review Source Response from Arcserve June 13, 2019 Thanks for the great feedback, Greg! Similar Products Featured ## Send me user reviews about this product ### Fill out the form and we'll send a list of the top-rated software based on real user reviews directly to your inbox.