ShadowProtect Backup Software Testimonials

"We haven't had any failures... since we've had StorageCraft in the equation."
Sean Furman - President, STF Consulting

StorageCraft partners are always finding great ways to use our technology and simplify their businesses. Here's how one managed service provider, STF Consulting, is using StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® to keep his customers up and running.
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"If I didn't have my work life set up so well, I wouldn't be able to take time away for my family or for my hobby. I'm very fortunate."
Sean Furman - President, STF Consulting

How do you balance work and family and still manage to save a little time for fun? Here's how one StorageCraft partner is doing all that, and making a tidy profit.
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Management at bedding manufacturer Sealy NZ Ltd are sleeping more soundly at night after switching to an offsite remote disaster recovery (DR) solution that ensures they lose no more than 15 minutes' data in the event of a crash. The problem was identified during an annual IT review. Although the company's former tape backup product was reporting successful backups, minimal data was being written to tape in a readable format. As a result, Sealy sought an alternative solution.

"We experienced the pain of potential data loss and decided we never wanted to be in that position again. We made a strategic decision to go with an organisation and solution that was able to eliminate the cost and complexity of backup, file recovery and disaster recovery (DR)."

The solution was implemented by Disaster Recovery Group (DRG), which uses StorageCraft's ShadowProtect backup solution.

Hugh Rockfort - Directory, Sealy NZ Ltd

Instead of taking more than a day to recover data and get back online, as it would have done using their former Symantec Backup Exec system, the ShadowProtect solution from StorageCraft had them up and running again within two hours. Business disruption was minimal.

"The sheer size of our system after we centralised demanded that we used a backup solution that was easier to use and restored files faster. ShadowProtect is much faster than our previous solution - up to twice as fast depending on configurations - and better for our business needs."

The Oaks Group has 40 ShadowProtect Server Edition licenses protecting file servers, print servers, SQL clusters, an Exchange cluster as well as Citrix servers and general servers. Mr. Solly introduced ShadowProtect after using it in a previous job.

Bryn Solly - IT General Manager, Oaks Hotels and Resorts Limited

"As a State School, our budgets are very limited and we have to watch every dollar. We migrated to ShadowProtect for less than the annual maintenance renewal on our existing backup product. Now that is value for money, especially when you consider that if we had renewed the maintenance on our existing backup product we could still have the same problems next year as we had this year!"

"StorageCraft really have delivered an outstanding solution at the right price point, so much that I would recommend every other school or company to seriously look at StorageCraft ShadowProtect when their backup product maintenance is up for renewal."

Ferny Grove State High School - "Backup as simple as ABC"

"Easy to install, easy to manage, easy to use and compared to other products - it works!"

John Koch, Network & Communications Analyst

The IT team at Great Lakes Council, in NSW, breathed a collective sigh of relief recently when their fallback backup system restored the drive in a crashed server within three minutes.

"Using StorageCraft ShadowProtect, we had the server up and running within three minutes, restored to the exact state of our last ShadowProtect backup - which was absolutely amazing, I hate to think what would have happened otherwise - the server rebuild would probably have taken up to two days. We saved a great deal of downtime and potential user problems."

Gerry Locke - IT Manager, Great Lakes City Council

"I first saw ShadowProtect 12 months ago and I was impressed with the ease of installation and configuration, as well as its affordability. More importantly the simplicity ShadowProtect brings to data recovery, including bare metal restore, making it a disruptive technology that Microsoft centric organisations must consider. With version 3.0, StorageCraft have made a great product even more compelling."

Dr. Kevin McIsaac - Advisor for Intelligent Business Research Service (IBRS).

"ShadowProtect has allowed us to dramatically streamline our backup and recovery procedures, saving us time while providing a higher level of service to our end users. If someone creates a file at 10am and deletes it at 10:30am, we can recover it in minutes. The HIR capability also makes short work of hardware migrations and P2V. ShadowProtect has become an indispensable part of our IT infrastructure."

Robert Wilkinson - Systems Support Specialist, Ku-ring-gai Council

"We had a need for a simple but effective backup and replication solution. ShadowProtect was able to accommodate this need. It's smart software at a very reasonable price."

Jon Dundas - Manager Administration & Information Technology, Maitland City Council

Moving from a tape-based storage environment last year to a disk-based one has paid dividends for retirement village operator, MetLifeCare. MetLifeCare had used several tape-based packages over the previous 10 years, most recently Symantec Backup Exec.

"When licensing for that product was up for renewal last year, it was a good opportunity to consider a new backup system," says Kai Sander, IT Manager at MetLifeCare.

Implementation was made easier by the fact MetLifeCare was using VMware and that StorageCraft and VMware are partners, however, even if MetLifeCare hadn't been a VMware site, "it wouldn't really have mattered - we would probably still have chosen StorageCraft."

Under the new arrangement, data and key databases are backed up every quarter of an hour - "and it's proven itself when people have deleted files and we've got them back within 15 minutes."

MetLifeCare - "I haven't seen anything better"

The authority has implemented the ShadowProtect disk-based backup and disaster recovery solution from StorageCraft, which has reduced data loss from a typical 18 hours in the event of a computer crash, to only 15 - 30 minutes.

"What previously meant several hours' downtime has been reduced to minutes with ShadowProtect. We can recover an entire server on to different hardware and have it fully operational within half an hour. This represents almost immediate disaster recovery. What has impressed us most is its hardware independent restore technology, which works flawlessly and adds only a few minutes to the rebuild process."

Alvaro also values the technology's ability to test backups using integration with VMware. He can test backups with a few mouse clicks and bring up a production server into a non-production virtual environment to prove that backups have worked correctly.

Alvaro Lozano - Rous Water, Regional Water Supply

"We use ShadowProtect IT Edition as part of our strategy in new desktop deployments. With ShadowProtect we can image desktops with complex software configurations and migrate them to the new hardware without having to re-install the original software. It saves us a considerable amount of time."

"Great solution - Thanks StorageCraft."

Ann Royston - IT Desktop Administrator, Wyong Shire Council

"ShadowProtect is proving its worth. We are using it to protect critical information on all of the company servers. By taking a full image on Sundays and automated hourly incremental backups during the week, we can restore at any time and on any hardware with minimal data loss in the event of a disaster."

Scott Harris - IT Manager, Miller Harris Lawyers

"I am a tough IT Manager to please. It has been a long time since I have seen a product as versatile and as easy to use as ShadowProtect. With a tight budget and aging hardware, I sleep better at night knowing my servers are 100% protected from any sort of failure."

"Never has a software package got me so excited. To perform a bare metal rebuild of my Domain Controller onto different hardware was fantastic. To do it in under an hour blew me away. The ease of use with managing your backups is amazing. The new ways ShadowProtect allows you to manage data restoration takes disaster recovery to a new level."

"For under $1000 per server, ShadowProtect offers great value for money and a low TCO. The free training (not that I think anyone needs it) provides your IT staff with all the knowledge they need to effortlessly manage and maintain full server protection."

Geoff King - IT Manager, Sphere Healthcare

"ShadowProtect is an outstanding solution - undefined it has substantially reduced the cost and complexity of providing backup, recovery and disaster recovery for all our Windows servers. For years I have struggled with reliable backups. Other "market leading" products are quite simply too complex and too expensive. Version 3.0 of ShadowProtect builds on their already robust engine and makes it an enterprise class technology. The Forever Incremental technology now enables me to take one base backup and then only sector based incrementals that are tiny compared to other file based backup products, as frequently as every 15 minutes undefined now I can rest assured that I will never again lose more than 15 minutes of Data, Exchange or SQL transactions after a crash or corruption!"

"I find the Hardware Independent Restore technology a life saver. I can now migrate a crashed server to a new, totally different server or virtual environment in literally minutes - amazing. I would recommend ShadowProtect to any company who has had to deal with traditional backup problems."

Karan Mehta - IT Director, B M & Y

"When Auckland company James Odell, which customises cars, was gutted by a fire, it was faced with a wrecked laptop that contained all the vital information about the company."

"The laptop was melted and burnt, as well as being water-damaged from fire hoses, and would have looked to most people as if it was beyond repair."

"But the company was able to retrieve its valuable data by using ShadowProtect software and virtualisation technology and was able to re-open from new premises just days later."

"James Odell contracted Softsource to retrieve the data and also to rebuild the company's IT infrastructure. This now includes new servers, PCs and a laptop."

Planning for the unlikely - and the unthinkable read more

Backup and recovery are imperative to even small businesses

"The most important part of any disaster recovery solution isn't the backup procedure and ease of use undefined it's the reliability and speed during a restore. We tested this in a lab with each backup product, but the ultimate test is when your server is dead (and when users are screaming) and you have to bring it back online. That's when you really have to trust your software. Make sure that whichever product is chosen, a lot of testing is done to ensure it will perform as expected when calamity strikes."

Editor's Choice Award - 4.5 Stars - APC Magazine, August 2007

"The ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1 image-backup utility would be worth ten times its price for the peace of mind it brings. You won't find a better product in this field."

"This software provides the fastest and smoothest backups and restores of any drive-image utility on the market, and a Vista-based emergency disk guarantees compatibility with the widest range of backup hardware. ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1 is the best such product and worth ten times its price in terms of peace of mind and flexibility."

"Fast, reliable image backups to local and network drives. Easy restores, even to different hardware. Plentiful scheduling and security options. Can mount images in VMware Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC."

Editor's Choice Award - PC Magazine, January 2008