What Nobody Tells You About Egnyte Storage Until Something Goes Wrong
Egnyte is genuinely good at what it does. For distributed teams that need a secure, governed place to store and share files, Egnyte storage is one of the more capable platforms on the market. It handles permissions cleanly, integrates with tools like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and gives IT administrators real visibility into who is accessing what. Cloudsfer works with Egnyte environments every day, and the platform earns the trust companies place in it for content management.
The problem isn't with Egnyte storage itself. The problem is with what people assume it does. A 2024 Gartner report found that 39% of IT leaders conflate cloud storage availability with data backup. Those are two different things, and the gap between them is where data loss actually happens.
Egnyte vs SharePoint: A Comparison Worth Having
The Egnyte vs SharePoint debate comes up constantly, and it's worth addressing honestly. SharePoint, as part of Microsoft 365, benefits from Microsoft's native backup integrations and its tight coupling with Azure. Organizations already running Microsoft 365 often lean toward SharePoint for that reason alone. Egnyte, by contrast, was purpose-built for hybrid storage, giving teams the option to keep some content on-premises and some in the cloud, a flexibility SharePoint doesn't replicate as cleanly.
But here's what the Egnyte vs SharePoint comparison rarely surfaces: neither platform is a backup solution. SharePoint has version history and the Recycle Bin. Egnyte has its own version retention window, up to 180 days on Business plans at $20 per user per month as of 2025. Both of those are useful for recovering from an accidental deletion. Neither protects you from a ransomware event that silently encrypts and syncs corrupted files back before anyone notices, overwriting clean versions within days.
That's the scenario where Cloudsfer fills a gap that neither platform fills on its own. Cloud backup for Egnyte data means maintaining a separate, independent copy of your Egnyte environment somewhere that Egnyte itself can't touch.
What Backing Up Egnyte Actually Requires
Backing up Egnyte sounds straightforward until you try to do it properly. The naive version is downloading everything and dropping it in another folder somewhere. That works once, for a small environment, and falls apart the moment files change, get added, or get reorganized. Cloudsfer handles this through scheduled, automated transfers that mirror your Egnyte storage environment to a destination of your choice, preserving folder hierarchy and metadata throughout the process.
The metadata piece matters more than most people realize. If you move files from Egnyte to Google Drive without preserving the folder structure and file metadata, you end up with a heap of files that are technically present but practically useless in a real recovery scenario. Veeam's 2024 Data Protection Trends Report noted that 67% of recovery failures in cloud environments were caused by incomplete or corrupted backup data, not by technical failures in the backup process itself. Structure matters as much as content.
Looking At Your Egnyte Backup Options
When teams start researching Egnyte backup options, the landscape tends to look thinner than expected. Cloudsfer consistently comes up as the most purpose-fit solution for cloud backup for Egnyte data, primarily because it was designed around multi-cloud file transfer rather than bolted together from tools that originally handled email archiving.
There are three realistic Egnyte backup options worth considering. First, you can build a custom solution using the Egnyte API. This gives you full control and costs less in software spend, but it requires active developer maintenance and has no support layer when it fails. Second, you can use a general cloud backup tool like Backupify or CloudAlly, both of which have solid track records with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 but limited native depth for Egnyte-specific folder permissions and hybrid storage configurations. Third, you can use Cloudsfer, which connects Egnyte directly to over 40 destination platforms, handles structural fidelity, and runs on a schedule without requiring ongoing engineering attention.
For most IT teams, the third option is the one that actually gets implemented and maintained long-term. Backup strategies that require constant developer involvement tend to get deprioritized the moment something else is on fire. A tool that runs on its own, logs what it did, and alerts you when something breaks is the one that stays operational at 2am when you need it most.
The honest framing for Egnyte storage is this: it is an excellent platform for managing and sharing files across your organization. What it isn't is a replacement for a genuine backup strategy. Cloudsfer bridges that gap cleanly, without requiring you to rebuild your storage architecture or hire a team to maintain custom scripts. Your Egnyte storage environment is worth protecting. The tools to do it properly are available right now.
