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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.
Competitive product with lots of options and good support.
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.
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
If you have a problem then you might as well forget about getting your data back.
The response time is horrible. By the time most tickets are responded, you've lost 2-3 days of backups.
A "tech support" person responded to my message forwarded by Sales. She tried the old "Microsoft Update Error" blame game.
Email notification tool does not always respond. With some errors and setup delay.
Showing Most Helpful
Showing 25 of 31 reviews
"Excellent backup and restore for physical servers"
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"ShadowProtect SPX has always come through when we have needed it "
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.
"* * * DISAPPOINTING SCAM * * * "
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"ShadowProtect including ImageManager and ShadowStream"
Overall: 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.
"Shadow protect is great for onsite and offsite backup"
Overall: 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
"Provides Confidence and Security"
Overall: 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
"Simple and effective in times of greatest need to recover data!"
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"We use this on over 100 servers for our customers and it has worked flawlessly"
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"ShadowProtect Works well until it doesn't"
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.
"The absolute best in backup and recovery!"
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"Although a bit more expensive than similar backup software, ShadowProtect checks all the boxes."
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"Quality and Support has decreased"
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"Backups you can trust"
Overall: 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.
"Better Options on the Market"
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"It just works"
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'
Vendor Response
"SMB friendly and scales well"
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"A very good choice if you want backup and build a DR plan"
Overall: 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.
"Shadow Protect"
Overall: 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
"Server was backup and running in 10 minutes"
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.
Vendor Response
"Awesome Backup for Mission Critical Servers"
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.
Vendor Response
"Great Backup for small business and enterprise server systems."
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.
Vendor Response
"Good backup, image based with incremental rollups"
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.
Vendor Response
"Reliable backup software with some neat features"
Overall: 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.
Vendor Response
"Easy image backups"
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.
Vendor Response
"Good Products,Completed Backup with Little Performance Impact"
Overall: Overall, I am happy with the product. It works well with very little need for ongoing troubleshooting and maintenance. I am secure in the knowledge that my customer's data is protected.
Pros: ShadowProtect is a is simply a good product. Backups complete without hassle and I very rarely notice a performance impact on the systems being backed up. Backups to disk or NAS are quick and reliable.
Cons: Configuring new backups are a bit complex. There was a definite learning curve when first beginning to set up backup jobs. It would be nice if this process was more intuitive.