N2W Backup & Recovery for AWS Advanced Edition

As an MSP managing healthcare and enterprise clients, I use N2W  Backup & Recovery to simplify and automate cloud backup and restore workflows.

Previously, when I was using native services, managing snapshots and retention policies across multiple accounts was time-consuming and inconsistent. With N2W  Backup & Recovery, I centralized this process into a single dashboard, allowing me to automate policies, monitor backup compliance, and execute cross-account restores with ease. My backup administration workload has dropped by more than 45%.

The intuitive interface and automated reporting have freed up engineers to focus on higher-value client projects instead of performing daily backup checks. Because many of my clients operate under HIPAA and SOC 2 requirements, N2W Backup & Recovery provided the documentation, reporting, and backup immutability that I needed to satisfy auditors.

One of the most valuable features is the reporting. When I compare my previous experience with native backup tools, I find that N2W Backup & Recovery offers a better variety of reports on success and failures, along with other cost savings analysis, all consolidated into a single report digest across all managed accounts.

I believe onboarding could be easier. While the platform supports multi-account architectures, the initial process for new customer accounts could be more automated. Currently, adding and configuring each new AWS  account includes setting up IAM  roles, policies, and replication targets, which requires several manual steps.

An automated account enrollment or bulk import feature integrated with AWS Organizations  or Control Tower  would save significant time and reduce administrative overhead.

I have used the solution for more than 5 years.

I previously used the AWS Backup  service. It did not have the granularity and reporting I was looking for.

The pricing model works well for my current MSP structure. I was able to integrate it into my current pricing structure with little friction.

If anyone is looking for an AWS-focused backup and recovery product, I would not hesitate to recommend N2W Backup & Recovery.

I use N2WS Backup & Recovery for the daily backup of our AWS  and Azure  Enterprise and Fastlane Customers.

Implementing N2WS Backup & Recovery improved our backup automation workflows in AWS . I now have centralized management for EC2 , RDS , EFS, and DynamoDB backups, with granular scheduling and lifecycle management. The ability to recover instances or volumes within minutes has improved our RTOs dramatically. Integration with IAM  and tagging policies made it easy to scale across environments while maintaining security and compliance.

Automated Backup & Recovery is a feature I have leveraged in my organization, and it is quite stable using N2WS Backup & Recovery for this purpose. Recovery speed is excellent with N2WS Backup & Recovery, which allows for instant recovery of virtual machines, databases, or files. The support of cross-region or cross-account recovery is an added benefit, protecting us if one data center or AWS region fails. This feature helps prevent data loss and ensures business continuity. I am able to replicate backups across AWS regions or even to different AWS accounts for disaster recovery. I can restore entire instances or specific files, folders, or volumes from snapshots. Cost optimization is achieved by automatically deleting outdated snapshots or moving older backups to Amazon S3  or Glacier for cheaper storage. Backup Policies and Lifecycle Management allow me to create flexible backup policies and retention rules.

I am quite satisfied with N2WS Backup & Recovery for AWS backup and disaster recovery. However, it could be improved to include disaster recovery in cross accounts for Azure  in upcoming releases.

I have been using N2WS Backup & Recovery for over 5 years.

I use N2W  Backup & Recovery to manage my AWS  backups more efficiently and utilize S3  to store these backups.

Traditionally, AWS  doesn't allow snapshots to be stored in S3 , but this product is able to perform that function.

Having multiple policies and schedules handled for me takes the burden out of managing backups across multiple departments.

I am able to have backups that are automatically managed.

Restores are much simpler to perform due to the easy-to-use interface.

The most valuable features are EC2  and RDS  backups, as well as VPC capture.

It is able to encapsulate the important AWS services I need to have backed up via the product.

They could expand their offering to include Lambda function backups and other native AWS services, as these can be recreated through CloudFormation  or Terraform .

This would help those who are not familiar with Infrastructure as Code  to back up and restore these services without the overhead of understanding IaC  configuration.

I have used the solution for 5 years.

Not all features are available in the cheaper plans, so I recommend reviewing what features are needed and planning accordingly.

Our primary use case is comprehensive, automated backup and disaster recovery for our core production environment on AWS. We rely on N2W to protect our fleet of EC2 instances, which run our main applications, and our RDS databases, which store all critical customer data. Before N2W, we managed backups with a combination of manual snapshots and custom scripts, which was both time-consuming and prone to human error. Our goal was to find a reliable, 'set-it-and-forget-it' solution that could guarantee our data was protected and provide a clear, rapid path to recovery in a disaster scenario.

N2W has significantly improved our operational efficiency and our confidence in our business continuity plan. The biggest improvement is automation. By using tag-based policies, any new EC2 instance or database launched by our development team is automatically included in the correct backup schedule without any manual intervention from the operations team. This has saved us countless hours and eliminated the risk of a critical server being left unprotected. Furthermore, it transformed our disaster recovery strategy from a theoretical plan into a tested, practical reality. The one-click cross-region recovery feature is incredible. We’ve run disaster recovery drills in a fraction of the time it used to take, allowing us to validate our Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective with management. This peace of mind is invaluable.

Policy-based automation is the most powerful feature. The ability to define backup schedules, retention periods, and disaster recovery policies and have them apply automatically based on resource tags scales perfectly with our environment and enforces a consistent data protection strategy across the organization. File-level recovery has been a lifesaver on several occasions when a user accidentally deleted an important file. The ability to mount a snapshot and recover a single file or folder in minutes—without having to restore an entire 2TB volume—is incredibly efficient and minimizes disruption. Cross-account and cross-region disaster recovery gives us true resiliency. Knowing that our entire application stack, including its VPC configuration, can be rebuilt in a different AWS region with a few clicks is the ultimate safety net against a region-wide outage or major security event.

While the product is excellent, there are a couple of areas for potential improvement. The process for version upgrades, which sometimes requires deploying a new instance, could be streamlined to allow for a more seamless in-place update. It would be extremely useful to have the ability to set a retention period on manual backups. Occasionally, we take a manual snapshot before a major deployment, and currently, these can be forgotten, leading to unnecessary storage costs. Adding an 'auto-delete after X days' option to manual backups, similar to scheduled policies, would be a fantastic addition for cost management and general housekeeping. The EKS backup module should be a great feature, and it would have been a useful functionality to have for cluster backup management.

Before adopting N2W, we managed our backups internally using a combination of AWS's native EBS Snapshot Lifecycle Manager and a series of custom Lambda scripts. While this approach was inexpensive, it quickly became complex and brittle as our AWS environment grew. The scripts required constant maintenance, there was no central dashboard for monitoring success or failure, and performing a full recovery was a complicated, manual process. We switched because we needed a solution that was more reliable, automated, and less dependent on our internal engineers' time to maintain.

My advice regarding pricing is to look at it in terms of total value and return on investment, not just the license cost. While N2W is a paid product, the cost is easily justified by the significant reduction in engineering hours spent on managing and troubleshooting custom backup scripts. The pricing model, which is based on the number of instances you protect, is straightforward and predictable. The real value comes from the drastically reduced risk of data loss and the speed at which you can recover. The cost of a few hours of downtime would far exceed our yearly N2W license fee, making it a very worthwhile investment for any serious business running on AWS.

We evaluated two other main options before choosing N2W. The first was AWS's native service, AWS Backup. While it is a solid service and integrates well, we found N2W's user interface to be more intuitive and its disaster recovery orchestration to be more powerful and straightforward at the time of our evaluation. The ability to recover an entire instance, including its network configuration, into another region from a single console was a major differentiator. We also briefly looked at another third-party vendor but found N2W's deployment and billing through the AWS Marketplace to be much simpler and more transparent.

My main advice to anyone considering N2W is to start with the free trial. Set it up for a small but critical part of your environment and test a full recovery scenario, including a cross-region disaster recovery drill. Seeing how quickly and seamlessly you can bring a complex application back online is what will truly sell you on the product. It is a solution that delivers tangible peace of mind. The support team has also been very responsive the few times we've had questions. Overall, it is a robust, reliable, and user-friendly product that does exactly what it promises.