Avi F.

I have to say that I went into my partnership with Datto with very positive expectations. I felt that I really connected with my "soon to be" rep, and the Cloud Continuity product, which has a BMR restore function, looked very promising. The wholesale pricing was fair, and the NFR offerings okay. I thought that I had gotten accurate answers to all of my questions, so I moved forward and started migrating users to Datto. The first red flag was that in less than a month, they changed my rep on me. He advocated to stay my rep, but they turned him down. Now, I just noticed in the console, once again my rep was changed on me. Nobody called me to tell me about this and if I didn't check my console, I would never have known. Over the next few months, I deployed many Cloud Continuity endpoints and one SIRIS. There were a few things that came up where I found that things that the initial rep had told me were completely inaccurate. For example, the rep told me that the Cloud Continuity product had the ability to virtualize in the cloud and the end user could work remotely until his "failed hardware" is replaced. This is not accurate! You can in fact virtualize and log in to the virtualization remotely, but the virtualization is not intended to work in it like it is in the SIRIS product. It is just for testing purposes, for example, to make sure that the BMR will boot. So, the sales team does not always have the correct information, and when I sell a product to an end user based on inaccurate info and then I can't follow through on those promises, it makes me look bad! This really left a bad taste in my mouth, but I chalked it up to improper training rather than the rep being intentionally deceitful. Moving on to the product itself. Initially, I did run into various issues, but the support team was always available, quick to answer the phone, and was usually able to resolve any issues quickly, so it was just a blip... but now that I've been using/selling the product for more than a year, the "cons" have become very apparent. First, the BMR portion of the backup constantly gets "broken" by Windows Updates, which in turn requires a "forced differential merge" to fix it. Up until recently, that meant I had to contact support to initiate it. When you have a lot of seats running this product, this can become a real hassle. To give Datto credit, they did add the ability for me (the reseller) to now initiate a differential merge through the console without having to contact support, which is better, but still annoying that it happens so often... you really have to be on top of the backups, because if you don't fix this issue, you will not be able to do a BMR with a recent backup until you do. Also, and this one is a biggie, I have already had 4 cases where I needed to use the BMR function (for 4 different end users). Only the first BMR went very smoothly with no issues. The other 3 were a real pain in the $#*!. There were either issues booting into the Datto Restore utility (which is linux based), or I was able to boot into the restore utility, but when I tried to initiate the restore, I would get some sort of error, for example, "generating minimum volume sizes failed" is a common one. This required calling into support and having to figure out a way around it. Let's skip forward to the point where either support got me to the next step, or I got there by myself. Now the Bare Metal Restore is in progress, which is done by transferring data over the internet…. I have never seen the transfer speed exceed 1.5MBPs and I have tried it from multiple locations using various internet service providers. (See the attached screenshot which shows a BMR restore that is currently in progress as we speak…. Look at the download speed! It's 850KBPs! This will take a week to restore! This is absolutely ridiculous! At those speeds any BMR will take DAYS to complete and if you tack on the time you have to spend with support to get the restore going in the first place, a BMR could take a week or more! The whole point of a BMR is to keep downtime to a minimum. This is a deal breaker for me! At this point, If I cannot get assurances from Datto that these issues are being addressed in the very near future, I will be cancelling all my endpoints and moving to another product.