Anyone here have any experience with a Datto Backup Appliance?

I have just been told that they’ve never run a full restoration in the six years that it’s been in service, deployed for the backup of four mission critical virtual Windows Servers, four Windows Workstation and a (physical?) Linux PABX server.

The actual appliance is apparently a “Datto S3-2000 BCDR”

Edit: The anal retentive in me is going WTF in a tight loop. The industry professional with 40 years experience in the field is going, different day, same old…

I realised that I didn’t actually ask the pertinent question, the hamster wheel was running full tilt, but is this normal, or is this WTF, or somewhere in-between?

  • blargbluuk@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    1 month ago

    you don’t have any control over the VM specifically for those emails or w/e. If it’s still a thing, Datto used to let you log in to the control panel and boot a test vm of the backup image to verify manually if need be.

    • Onno (VK6FLAB)OP
      1·
      1 month ago

      That’s very interesting. Does this mean that you can test any backup without needing to do a manual data recovery taking several hours?

      • blargbluuk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        in a pinch yes you could boot it up grab the stuff you need and send it wherever. Again, it’s been a while since I’ve had to touch any of their stuff, but the BCDR devices were one of the best backup appliances I’ve used, they had file shares as an option amongst a few other methods to easily recover data through the backups it’s taken.