Nakivo Backup & Replication 11 review: The on-prem backup host with the most

SMBs are faced with a huge choice of data backup products but Nakivo's Backup & Replication (NBR) adds extra appeal as it supports more host platforms than any other solution. Along with versions for Windows, Linux, VMware, Nutanix and AWS EC2, Nakivo provides packages for all the main NAS appliance vendors including Qnap and Synology plus generic ARM-based models.

Client support is good as although macOS support is still missing, NBR can protect Windows and Linux servers and workstations, VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix hosts and business apps including Exchange and SQL Server. NBR secures all Microsoft 365 (MS365) components with v11 on review adding support for MFA-protected MS365 accounts and options for direct cloud-to-cloud backup to a wide range of public clouds.

There's more as NBR 11 has real-time replication of VMware vSphere 8 virtual machines (VMs) currently in beta testing and introduces agentless backup for ProxMox Virtual Environment (VE) to eliminate the need for guest OS agents. Nakivo improves data security further with source-side backup encryption so it's protected in-flight and at rest in the backup repository.

Nakivo Backup & Replication 11 review: Synology deployment

Nakivo offers a 14-day trial with all features unlocked and we opted to install NBR on a Synology DS1823xs+ desktop NAS appliance running DSM 7.2. We immediately hit a glitch as the latest version isn't available in the DSM Package Center app as it is still undergoing Synology verification.

Nakivo had us covered though, as it provides an excellent online tutorial showing how to upgrade the available v10 app to the latest version. We used PuTTY to SSH to the appliance and followed the CLI instructions to download v11 and apply it in 10 minutes.

NBR comprises three service components with a Director for browser-based management, Transporters to handle backup, replication plus recovery operations, and Repositories for storing backups. A repository was automatically created on our Synology NAS but there are plenty of other choices as you can use local folders or CIFS/NFS network shares plus standard and immutable cloud storage from Amazon EC2 and S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, Wasabi, and Backblaze B2.

Ransomware protection goes further as during backup job creation you can enable encryption and immutable recovery points which cannot be deleted for a set number of days. Malware scanning is also available as NBR can employ a separate server hosting Microsoft Windows Defender, ESET, Sophos Intercept X or Clam AV to scan backups prior to recovery.

Nakivo Backup & Replication 11 review: Data protection

The NBR web console is well designed and systems to be protected are added to the NBR inventory with our physical Windows servers and Hyper-V host automatically receiving the Transporter service. Adding our VMware vSphere host just required its admin credentials and all its VMs were presented ready for agentless backup.

A minor change to the console now groups backup jobs under a new Data Protection tab. These cover all protection essentials as you choose systems from your inventory, select a repository, apply a schedule, set the number recovery points you want retained, decide on how many days you want them to be immutable, and enable features such as network and backup encryption.

You can also create jobs for backup copies, VMware, Hyper-V or Amazon EC2 replication and the new real-time VMware replication. When creating jobs for VMware vSphere, you can select individual VMs but we chose the top-level host system so any new VMs created would be automatically added to the backup job.

Protecting MS365 accounts requires a special SaaS repository and we had no problems creating this on our Synology NAS using a share path name. The MS365 authentication process is really simple as it only requires three steps, after which we created a single scheduled job to protect all four components.

Nakivo Backup & Replication 11 review: Data recovery and malware scans

NBR provides a wealth of restore features and for files and folders you select a recovery point and choose the data you want restored. Application-aware backups ensure Active Directory (AD) and hosted SQL Server and Exchange apps are automatically included and recovery services extend to restoring AD, SQL databases and Exchange objects.

MS365 granular recovery allowed us to select any component, choose items, and restore them to their original location or to another user. Disaster recovery features are excellent and include replication of VMs as clones and using a Flash VM Boot recovery job to quickly create a new VM directly from the backup repository without restoring it first.

To test malware scanning, we declared a Dell PowerEdge R760xs host running Windows Server 2022 to NBR as a Windows Defender scan server. During a Hyper-V VM recovery job creation we enabled the deep scan option although you can choose a quick scan which only checks the OS disk.

The deep scan process was undemanding as the job took 43 minutes with the dual 2GHz Xeon Scalable Silver 4416+ CPUs in the nominated scan server registering a very brief 60% utilisation at the start and then settling down to around 5%. We'd pre-loaded the test Hyper-V VM with malware prior to backing it up and NBR identified it, aborted the recovery job as requested and highlighted it in the job overview page as failed.

Nakivo Backup & Replication 11 review: Is it worth it?

NBR licensing is completely transparent and very flexible with Nakivo offering a wide choice of perpetual licences or per-workload subscriptions. It provides a handy online cost calculator with an Enterprise 10-server perpetual licence and a 2-year 24/7 support contract costing £1,874.

MS365 licensing is separate with the minimum 10 user subscription costing £252 per year. Real-time replication for VMware comes in at £971 for a single-socket perpetual licence and NBR also offers a separate VMware host monitoring service with a perpetual license costing £464 per socket.

Nakivo's Backup & Replication 11 is ideal for SMBs that want the freedom to choose their host system. It supports an incredible range of hardware platforms and OSes, offers an impressive range of system and data protection features and it is very competitively priced.