--- title: Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Reviews meta_title: 'Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 12 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.3 review_count: 12 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-12' parent_category: name: Cloud Security url: https://www.g2.com/categories/cloud-security --- # Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Reviews **Vendor:** STORServer **Category:** [Cloud Data Security Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/cloud-data-security) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 12 ## About Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), which serves as the engine for STORServer Appliances Powered by TSM, gives you centralized, automated data protection for physical, virtual, and cloud environments. ## Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Reviews ### 1. Pros and Cons of Tivoli Storage Manager **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nicole V. | Content Writer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 21, 2024 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Tivoli Storage Manager is a software that stores and backups and protects data from getting leaked. The software is profilerated by IBM. There are many reasons to use Tivoli Storage Manager and integrate it in your business processes. The software can be used by small and large businesses. 1. Tivoli Storage manager backups the data and protects data from getting leaked in any environment. 2. It has a feature where it eliminates duplicated data this feature helps to save storage. 3. It can be integrated with various applications and softwares. 4. To protect data from getting leaked, Tivoli Storage Manager has encryption policies which acts as shield from data getting leaked when it is transmitted. 5. Tivoli storage manager offers customer support, it offers technical assistance by phone, email and forums. It also offers them training to learn and get equipped with TSM. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Setting up Tivoli storage manager can be difficult and require expertise. The maintaince cost of Tivoli storage manager can be quite high and small sized businesses can find it hefty. In the intial phases, it can be quite difficult to integrate the system with existing IT and it also requires intense effort and customization. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Tivoli storage manager helps me to store, protects and backups my data. I think data is quite important for any company so it's quite beneficial for me as I dont have to worry about someone stealing my data. ### 2. Review on tivoli storage manager platform **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Charul K. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2024 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** It provide centralized management for backup and recovery operations across different kind of environment. It provide high end security while transferring data. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** It setting up and configuration process is to complex and hard to understand for new user as like me. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** It provide centralized backup and recovery of ad data which help me to download the backup across diverse IT environment ### 3. Its a backup powerhouse, but steep learning curve **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohan K. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2023 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Rock solid backups for a wide range of systems such as databases, applications. It also handles massive datasets and complex environments with advanced options like deduplication,encryption, and disaster recovery. Best thing is set it and forget it with customized storage tierings and retention policies. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Comparing to new age solutions command line heavy for advanced tasks. Web interface still lags in some areas. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Disaster recovery during cyberattacks as TSM facilitates rapid restoration from offsite locations,by minimizing dataloss. Techniques like deduplication, tiering storing data by indexes and catalogs for easy retrieval across various storage tiers based on importance and frequency ### 4. Review and suggestions on tivoli storage manager **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rohit K. | Senior UI/UX Designer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2024 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** It major provide comprehensive solution for data protection, also offers backup, achieve and disaster recovery capabilities in a single platform **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** It is to complex to setup and configure, especially for large IT companies. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** It Reducded risk of data loss and which boost the reliability of IT systems. Because of it data security improved. ### 5. Tivoli Storage Manager- Backup Master **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 16, 2023 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Tivoli Storage manager is the best solution to secure your data as Centralized and in automated manner. the best feature of TSM is that it connects easliy to Server, SAN and NAS and reduce the risk to data to be loss. it used to be in high demand before 10 years ago. Offered this to lots of Happy customer. it is easy to use. it also give best archive policy. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Need to work on pricing as there are cheaper solution are also available in market. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Incremental data Backup , File restore, Best Archieve Policy ### 6. Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) - backup and recovery **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** SANTOSH M. | Senior System Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 05, 2022 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** One of the best thing about this tool what I like is incremental data/file backup. Best suits for Servers especially in Virtual machines/infrastructure. Data recovery with perfection wrt data/time/seconds. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Faced few regular backup failure due to VSS and RC12 errors. Sometime due to writer/tape issues occurred. Apart from these one of the best in this category. Needs to improve the VSS issue in Windows. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Backup and restore. Incremental backup. Servers/VMs infrastructure backup. Disaster recovery management. TSM archive policy. ### 7. Good product but costly **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 16, 2022 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Flexible retention policy and backup on file level is great. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Expensive, less costly options available in the market. **Recommendations to others considering Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM):** If you need a good storage manager, you can use Tivoli but be prepared to spend a decent chunk. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** Use it for backups on windows and linux servers. ### 8. TSM is an easy to use disaster recovery solution that integrates easily. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jason L. | PC Technician, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2021 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Tivoli Storage Manager integrates with VMWare and provides file-level or image recovery. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** We have like all the options that TSM provides. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** We solved a file-level recovery and image revovery issue. ### 9. Backup system extremely granular even if a little complex **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Networking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2021 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** What I appreciated most is the policy-based management of file storage and backups, with automatic data migration between storage tiers. It's a good way to save resources and therefore storage costs. I also really appreciated the deduplication functionality of source and destination data. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** The thing I appreciated least is the complexity of configuring the system. It is extremely granular and scalable, with customizable configurations possible to the extreme, but it requires solid knowledge of the product in order to be configured correctly and efficiently. **Recommendations to others considering Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM):** I would recommend the choice of TIvoli Storage Manager to medium and large sized companies, which need a backup and disaster recovery system that is absolutely reliable and customizable, with a very high level of reliability. I would recommend that the ICT personnel who have to manage Tivoli Storage Manager should be given appropriate training, even better if it is certification courses. This can help a lot the ICT staff both in the deployment and in the use phase, regardless of the fact that you can choose or not the support of a specialized consultant. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** With Tivoli Storage Manager, I replaced an old, limited backup system to create a new, much more efficient and reliable system. I won't name the product I replaced, but I can say that it was a good product that was quite popular in small and medium businesses. However, Tivoli Storage Manager proved to be clearly superior and this was the reason for my choice. ### 10. Very powerful backup infrastructure but extremely difficult to configure **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2019 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** I greatly appreciated the ability to fully customize and schedule each individual backup task and every single portion of the infrastructure. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** It is a very expensive product and requires a level of knowledge that can only be obtained if you have IBM certifications; the support of a consultant is necessarily needed. It is a very difficult product to configure and manage. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** It was a valid product for backup and disaster recovery management. ### 11. TSM - A True Data Recovery And Reliable Software **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2018 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** We have been using IBM TSM on one of our critical plant site for file level backup. Business data is protected because all the users documents, which are mapped to a central sharepoint server are getting backed up using TSM. There have been event in past when user deleted folder/files and we were able to recover those very quickly from last backup. **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** The administration is complex which means you need skills to manage this product. There is no GUI (clients) for the software and it's is all command line, so you need a dedicated resource and may be some high skills to manage. **Recommendations to others considering Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM):** Explore low cost software in terms of licenses **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** TSM works great for what we need it to do. As of now I don't see anything at this moment that requires change or adjusting. ### 12. TSM Backup review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2015 **What do you like best about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** TSM archive policy Policy based retention management is easy for modification without doing any transaction TSM for virtual environments **What do you dislike about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)?** Frequent failures because of Windows VSS issues Restore makes issues when looking for fast recovery DB reorganization time with DB2. DB2 skills also requires for troubleshooting. **What problems is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am a TSM administrator and I have to provide all the business requirement within the given RPO and SLA. TSM restore is pretty fast with VTLs especially IBM ProtecTier. ProtecTier will give an alternative for the copy storage pools and we can use the server resources for other activities. I found PT is a best match with TSM backup. - [View Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/tivoli-storage-manager-tsm/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-12+21%3A55%3A10+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=b8c34443-d538-4fa8-81e0-63db381c9797&secure%5Btoken%5D=7538830afd371544d5dcd07a8e76b2d5efb6c1f658cdb3775fc44b85be93d795&format=llm_user) ## Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Features **Data Protection** - Data Masking - Data Encryption/Security - Data loss Prevention - Anomoly Detection - Sensitive Data Compliance **Cloud Visibility** - Data Discovery - Cloud Registry - Cloud Gap Analytics **Analysis** - Cloud Gap Analytics - Compliance Monitoring - User Analytics **Security** - Data Security - Data loss Prevention - Security Auditing **Administration** - Auditing - Data Discovery - Access Control **Identity** - SSO - Governance - User Analytics ## Top Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Alternatives - [Cisco Duo](https://www.g2.com/products/cisco-duo/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (499 reviews) - [Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud](https://www.g2.com/products/acronis-cyber-protect-cloud/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (1,370 reviews) - [Sprinto](https://www.g2.com/products/sprinto-inc/reviews) - 4.8/5.0 (1,653 reviews)