If you are working in the SMB market, you might be facing with the usual challenge of having a very limited to no budget for backup. Please don’t take that as an excuse to skip backup all together, as your management will not tolerate not having backup when things go south. It’s important to recognize that Virtualization availability features while help improve your availability should not be considered a replacement to backup.
The good news, there are quite a few good SMB focused free backup solutions for virtualized environments. In this post, I will be covering one of those options by Unitrends that is not only free, but offer some advanced features that you can usually only find in paid versions of other solutions like Instant VM Recovery.
You will be happy to know that an advanced free backup solution such as “Unitrends Free”, does not require advanced knowledge or training to run. The installer will guide you through the installation and deploy the virtual appliance for you and get you ready in no time and ensure you get it right the first time.
Below are the top features of Unitrends Free:
- Deployed as a Virtual Appliance – This not only save you on OS licensing, but as well streamline the installation process and ensure a consistent experience for customers. I am a big fan of virtual appliances.
- FREE vSphere and Hyper-V VM Backup – Unlimited VMs and Sockets – Hypervisor level protection for vSphere and Hyper-V for up to 1TB of production VM data – there’s no tie to the number of VMs or sockets in the environment.
- Instant VM Recovery – Quickly run a virtual machine directly from a backup to reduce downtime. Additionally, you can use Instant VM Recovery to spin up copies of your virtual machines for recovery verification or test and development purposes. This is a premium feature that many other backup solutions restrict to only their paid edition.
- Automated Daily Scheduling – Set it and forget it scheduling with daily recovery points keeps you protected, even when you’re not around.
- Fast, Incremental Forever Backups – Keep your environment protected EVERY DAY. Changed-block tracking and forever incremental backups ensure your backups complete fast and only process changed data after the first backup, so you can get backups done every day without a ton of storage.
- Unitrends Community Integration – Free forum support from the Unitrends Community. Directly integrated into the user interface, you can search the forum and work with our community to help each other and earn great prizes and rewards
There is no better time to try Unitrends Free than now! You can download the beta and as long you register for the community forum (which you will need to obtain support) during the process Unitrends will send you a free t-shirt!
I would like to hear your feedback about Unitrends Free or other free backup solution that others might find useful.