Backblaze Business Backup vs. Bacula Enterprise

Backblaze's "set it and forget it' interface is ideal for home users. In addition, the $50/year pricing is very competitive. Most business should find Backblaze as a very good backup solution, but in cases where a backup archive needs to be kept indefinitely, alternative solutions should be looked at (specifically CrashPlan - though it is significantly more expensive at $10/month).

Incentivized

Well suited: - I use it for on premise and cloud backup and recovery and it is excellent for this job. - I also experiment with different hypervisors and till now Bacula seems to work with all of them - Security is really important for me as I had many bad experiences in the past and Bacula solution makes me totally confident. Less appropriate - You need to be experienced Linux user, I had to learn few more things in system to make the best use of it. - It's definitely designed for scalability and bigger companies than mine

• Backblaze offers unlimited backups for a low-low cost per computer. Essentially, it's $5 for an all you can eat back-up buffet.
• The interface is simple - both on the computer side when you're configuring it. But more importantly, the online interface to search through your stored data is simple and efficient. Once you find what you're missing you can restore via downloading a zipped archive, requesting a USB drive, or you can have large data loaded onto a hard drive.
• It has never let me down - which in the world of remote back-up is amazing.

• The support services provided by Bacula Systems are superb. They usually respond extremely quickly and have clear and useful answers upfront, which is a welcome change. Their support enabled us to get Bacula Enterprise up and running quickly and well configured, in a relatively short period of time. In addition, they also offer proactive support on a yearly basis. This involves sending an automatically generated report on your system configuration and status from which they provide advice on any issues or configuration problems that they find. I haven't seen this level of proactive support from another company.
• The configuration is extremely powerful and flexible. If you're used to dealing with text-based configuration files then you'll find this system familiar. It also fits well with configuration management tools - in our case, Puppet - allowing the configuration across the whole system to be managed centrally. The flexibility of the system allowed us to have backups running exactly when and how we wanted, performing staging to tape via disk, and with various admin, tasks to automate the handling of tapes within our tape library.
• The command-line console tool allows all operations to be done from the command line. In an emergency situation, or stuck in a datacentre with only a dumb console, being able to do everything via the command line is an important feature to have.
• Bweb is an optional extra that provides a web-based interface for both management and configuration. If you don't want to edit text files and use the command line console tool then Bweb is the best interface to use. We don't use it for configuration (favoring external tools for managing the text-based configuration), but we do use it to monitor backups and perform restores. It provides an excellent overview of what's happening with the system.
• The manuals, whitepapers, and additional documentation cover everything in detail. The whitepapers give a good overview of the installation, concepts, and specific scenarios, whilst the manuals cover in more depth how specific areas work and how the configuration is handled. It's very easy to find out what a particular option means and does.
• The software can run on and is supported on, a wide variety of operating systems, including Ubuntu which is what we use. This is a level of flexibility that was important to us after being tied to RHEL for our previous backup system.

Incentivized

• Backblaze, once installed, resides in the app tray on the lower right of windows. It's just a small menu that takes you to your website to perform recovery operations. You also have to install their little download and unzipping app after you select files to restore. I would like to see a single backup and restore interface that runs locally and handles all those details in the background.
• If you have to reinstall your computer, they additionally setup and charge you for a new license, even though you have an account, you can't simply log in and reconnect to it. I didn't find this out until I saw the charge on my credit card. Now that I have the data I need downloaded, I have to call them and have the original license canceled for a pro-rated (partial) credit. I was told this is how system administrators preferred to minimize downtime. As a small business owner, I found it irritating.

Incentivized

• Takes a while to get used to the software. It's not something that you can just install and work away with. You need to figure it out first. We did get a free training course when we purchased the Bacula Enterprise version which we found very useful.
• Support Documentation is very in depth but it's a tough read sometimes. Takes a while to understand the concepts from this documentation. Could do with making the documentation a small bit easier to understand.

Easy to use, proactive and effective customer support, and simple deployment method. The high configurability is what makes this tool so effective for my organization - at no point do I have any issues of trust as to the restorability of a fileset. The GUI provided gives clear actionable reports as to the effectivity of the jobs performed.

Incentivized

The only bad thing about Backblaze B2 is that to use it to its full ability, you need a third party to truly get any use out of it and its cheap price because they don't have their own software. Now, on the desktop endpoint back-up for non-B2 storage, they have a fantastic client with unlimited back-ups that is only $6 per month.

Incentivized

It still has a lot of flaws to overcome, especially in the area of user friendliness. Searching and filtering is quite cumbersome. Once you find the job you from which you want to restore, be sure to write that job number down because you won't be able to quickly find the job again without it during a recovery.

Incentivized

Bacula Enterprise is always available when we need it, both the backup solution and system support

Operation in the Bacula system has a light and fast interface and reports are generated almost instantly. Perhaps if Bacula is integrated with other solutions it may lose some performance

I've never had to reach out to customer support, but their periodic emails letting me know if a device is missing are very nice for informing me when something is wrong. Based on how helpful their system is, I would imagine their customer support is top-notch.

Incentivized

We have always been very well served by Bacula Enterprise support. The response time is excellent, and any doubts or problems are resolved quickly and easily, avoiding complications and the evolution of problems that could arise. Only praise for Bacula Enterprise's service and support. The monitoring of the entire process from acquisition to implementation was very well done.

The professor understood the tool very well, it was a fact that he had mastery over the system and knew what he was talking about, clearing up all doubts and passing on all the necessary knowledge so that we could handle Bacula Enterprise in our organization.

Bacula Systems and especially Bacula Brazil were extremely attentive and served us very well, making all implementations or changes work perfectly

I previously used CrashPlan before they pivoted their business model. CrashPlan was fine, and has feature parity with Backblaze. I was motivated to move from CrashPlan to Backblaze for 2 reasons - 1, as they pivoted, they increased their cost, which was frustrating, and 2, because they had always had a java-based client that wasn't as performant as a native client. Backblaze is so unobtrusive because of its highly performant client, and I couldn't be happier.

Incentivized

The possibility of increasing the amount of data to be saved without having to pay more for the license was one of the things that led us to choose Bacula, but when effectively testing the tool, it became clear that in addition to the financial benefit, we would also have a backup reliable and robust.

Bacula provides intelligent scalability by expanding backups across multiple environments, data backup, Oracle, virtual machines, Office365, cloud...

• The Backblaze service has provided a huge return on investment. We had a system fail, and it was very easy to have a drive with the backup data shipped to us for recovery.
• The service has been very cost effective, allowing us to keep costs down while maintaining a good system integrity.

Incentivized

• What price can you put on recovery? The very first time we had to restore from backup, having Bacula Enterprise support paid for itself.
• The extremely good visibility into Bacula Enterprise's operations--as opposed to some competitors where you don't really know what it's doing--makes me trust it more.