Afi SaaS Backup

Excellent software and piece of mind

Vorteile:

We love the fact that we have everything constantly backed up - with the ability to easily recall previous versions of creative projects if there's a corruption or anything else goes wrong.

Nachteile:

We've had a couple of issues with the UI not displaying properly when we needed to get into the system. Support were able to fix though.

Review of GSuite backup solutions

Kommentare: So far, it has been a great experience. The only issue we have really experienced is regarding notification for billing as the email notification seems to not be obvious as it references a different company and/or is auto-generated from the company's billing system.

Vorteile:

AFI is a stable solution that is mid-range priced for schools. It is difficult to justify the cost of SaaS backup solutions compared to traditional on-prem backup solutions so we need to find the cheapest solution that allows us to comply with overarching laws, legislation and policies. At the same time, the solution needs to be stable.

Nachteile:

Our previous SaaS backup solution/vendor had more inclusions/services at a cheaper price than AFI so it was difficult to pitch a move to AFI to our school management. It seems that backup products are not considered in-depth at a management level as it is a simple cost for compliance discussion.

You can't rely on it

Kommentare: I used this to back up my small G-Suite account with five people.
Technically, this worked fine. Our Google Drive has nowadays more than 5 TB of data, which is not all that big for a G-Suite account. Such a drive can get much bigger, and Google won’t charge extra. But Afi does. Even though their pricing page clearly says that their license is purely user bases and that shared drives are included at no additional cost, their customer support had a bad surprise for me. They wrote to me that our G-Suite account is larger than 5 TB in their system, so they had to charge $350 per month instead of the $15 per month that I signed up for. That was a shock to me. They stated a fair use clause in their ToS, but when I looked it up, that clause did not mention the 5 TB limit, neither any volume-based price that they have to charge. So I did not pay the $350. We lost our backup and had to switch the provider. In case you take your chance and work with this company despite their questionable business practices, I suggest you either keep a close eye on how much space your G-Suite account takes up in their system or be prepared to pay much more than anticipated.

Vorteile:

You can assign different service levels for the various users of your G-Suite organization

Nachteile:

You can suddenly lose your backup when your data consumes a certain amount of space in their system.

The only feasible solution to backup Drive in Google Workspace

Kommentare: It mitigates the lack of a built-in backup tools in Google Workspace very elegantly. The build-in data security features of Google Workspace are not sufficient. "Vault", "30 days rewind option" and the "file versioning" are not capable to recover a random human error. (example: John Doe deleted the folder with the quarterly figures 40 days ago. He didn't realise it within the 30 days period, that the onboard tools would cover, because he uses them typically only all 90 days. And vault can only recover single files and looses a lot of metadata).

Vorteile:

It backups also all metadata that we allocate to files in Drive. Ease of use.

Nachteile:

Each recovered document gets a new document ID. This is imminent to the Google API - alle backup solution today are dealing with it. But from a user perspective still not ideal.

Afi SaaS Backup review

Kommentare: We wanted our users to be able to restore their files from the backup and this software delivers this to us.

Vorteile:

We use it Afi SaaS Backup with Google G Suite and we like most this software for very easy use. This program is also well documented.

Nachteile:

At this moment, we have not found anything that we believe could be improved.