TR Computer Sales

TR Computer Sales is a Minnesota MSP managing about 3,000 endpoints across 300 active clients. After more than ten years with a single backup vendor, backups on their Windows Server 2025 domain controllers started failing. The vendor said Server 2025 was supported. The fix their support team recommended took down a production server. TR tested a Slide device against the same server and it backed up on the first attempt. About a year later they are replacing their entire BCDR fleet, roughly 200 devices, and every technician on the team can run a restore without escalation.

When Support Failed

TR Computer Sales had been with the same backup vendor for well over a decade. The product worked. The partnership worked. Matt Timm, who leads the NOC team, is clear that the technology was never the original problem.


What changed was how the vendor did business after it was acquired.


TR was a top-tier partner in the vendor's program. That tier stopped meaning anything. Support moved behind a paywall, and reaching a level two technician quickly became something TR had to pay extra for rather than something their status already covered.


Billing became its own running joke internally. Questions went unanswered for long enough that Matt's internal support lead started sending him the Rose-from-Titanic GIF whenever another billing thread went quiet.


"It's been 84 years."


Like most MSPs, TR was already testing alternatives. They had been for a while, without finding anything they liked.

The Breaking Point

Then the problem became technical.


TR upgraded domain controllers to Windows Server 2025 and backups started failing. The vendor's documentation said Server 2025 was supported. It was not working. Support provided instructions to fix it, and following those instructions killed a production server.


"That was the straw that broke our camel's back."


At that point the search stopped being exploratory. TR reached out to Slide, got a demo device, and pointed it at the same upgraded Server 2025 domain controller that had been failing.


It backed up. No issue, first attempt.


That was the moment the decision got made, and it is worth being precise about what it proved. It did not prove Slide was better across the board. It proved Slide did the specific thing TR needed done, on the specific server that had been broken, without a support ticket.

A Smooth Migration

Replacing a core piece of the stack after ten years is usually a project measured in quarters. TR was braced for contract negotiation, hardware logistics, retraining and downtime.


Devices ship pre-staged, so deployment stopped being a skilled task.


"I could send a trained monkey out to plug it into the system, and the servers just hook up automatically."


The bigger relief was that TR did not have to plan the sequence themselves. Their Slide rep mapped the existing fleet and built a phased replacement ramp, deciding which devices got swapped when, so TR's team never had to hold the migration plan in their heads alongside their day jobs.


Matt has been at TR for nine years and has owned onboarding for every tool in the stack.


"This is probably the smoothest onboarding of any sort of stack item we've had."

No Specialist Required

The old console was complex enough that restores were a specialist job. TR kept a small group of technicians trained and available for them, which meant restore speed depended on who happened to be at their desk.


The Slide console removed the requirement. Account managers and junior staff who are not in the portal regularly can work through a restore without training or a phone call.


"I get told all the time by my account managers, man, I went to do a restore, I had no idea what I was doing, but it was so easy to click through and find what I needed. I didn't have to guess, I didn't have to call and ask. It was like I had done it a dozen times."


The practical test arrived on its own. During the week this interview took place, all three of the technicians who used to be required for restores were on vacation at the same time. It was not an issue, and nobody had planned around it.


Slide's ConnectWise integration pushes alerts into the ticketing system, so technicians resolve them from the ticket rather than working in two places at once.

Trust in Action

TR was onboarding a new client under difficult circumstances. The client had come to them without working backups in place and did not know it, which made getting protection running a priority rather than a scheduled task. As Matt puts it, "We did have a box that arrived DOA, and it happened to be going into Easter weekend."


A Slide engineer came into the office on a day the company was closed and overnighted a replacement so TR had it Monday morning. No escalation path, no premium support tier.


Matt raised it with the Slide team afterward and found they did not think much of it.


"They're like, oh yeah, it's not a big deal. I'm like, no, you don't understand how big of a deal this was for us."


His read on why it mattered is about trust rather than the hardware.


"Not that our confidence was low by any means. It just makes that relationship so much better, knowing that you guys are willing to do what seems little to help us out."

Easy to Scale

One of TR's clients grew quickly and needed more servers protected than their appliance had capacity for.


Matt went into that conversation expecting it to be painful.


What he got was a question about what size he needed now, a six terabyte unit shipped out, and a return label in the box for the old one. Because everything is month to month, the swap did not trigger a renegotiation or a new term.


"It feels like it shouldn't be this easy, but it is."


Right-sizing works in the other direction too. A one terabyte option means TR's smaller clients are not paying for capacity they will never use, which matters across a base of 300.

A Better Partnership

TR is replacing their entire BCDR fleet with Slide. Not because a contract obliges them to, and not as a phased evaluation. Matt asked their previous vendor whether they would discuss ending the remaining contracts early, on the grounds that both sides would rather stop spending resources on a relationship that was over.


They did not respond.


Matt's summary of the difference is not about features.


"You get so beaten down. It's so refreshing to just have people who get it, and want to help, and want to see you succeed, and not just care about the bottom line."

Proof Over Promises

If you are a generalist MSP with a few hundred clients and a backup platform you have stopped trusting, the useful part of this story is probably not the migration mechanics. It is that TR did not switch on a promise. They took a demo device, pointed it at the exact server that was broken, and watched what happened.


That is the advice Matt gives other MSPs considering it.