Nicholas Webb "Nick"

Best Tool To Manage Ad Hoc AWS Instance Backup

• March 21, 2014
• Review verified by AWS Marketplace

Update 2/12/2015

Since the 1.5.0 update to CPM, all of our complaints have been answered, thus updating my review from 4 stars to 5.

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For our clients we find ourselves managing a number of "Ad Hoc" AWS instances, and there aren't a lot of good solutions (or any) to keep track of snapshot backups. Sure we have scripts to do it, but we always find bugs and auditing is an issue and takes time. We've found on many occasions that our script failed to remove some snapshot, only to be found months later and costing us money. The time and headache involved was just not worth it.

By "Ad Hoc" I simply mean not fully automated, a one-off server. If you have a fully automated stack your backup needs are probably much less, but again for us we have many specialized servers and need traditional style backups.

Not finding any solutions, we considered writing our own more robust script/application, but then we found CPM, and I'm very glad we did. It does everything we need and keeps everything nice and neat, and it allows our clients to login and check on backups as well, if they so choose, something we would have never had time to implement in our own system. VSS backups for Windows instances is a nice add-on as well.

This really is the only product out there to manage AWS backups and it will meet your expectations.

There aren't any strong negatives to this product, but it is clearly a version 1.x product. All the key features you need are there, but there are missing "nice to haves" that you may miss. One of these for us is the "managed accounts" feature. These accounts let you give customers or other departments their own account, but right now there is no way to see their backups on your dashboard from an admin account, you must login with the same user/password as "managed account" to see this. Not a showstopper for us.

Finally, the support staff for N2WS has been great. They always respond to support requests very quickly and have helped us through any problems we have encountered with the product. They also have been very helpful letting us know what new features and fixes are in the pipeline.

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