Bacula Enterprise vs. Barracuda Backup

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

If you are a small business with a few machines and your backups aren't of servers that are public facing. If you had to restore a server from backup, it would take a day at least. So, if the server being restored was public facing, that may impact customer relations.

Incentivized

• 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

• The cloud control is great!! I'm able to restore files and folders from basically any machine on the Internet. I can restore either the local machine I'm using at the time, or directly to the server from which it came.
• The user interface. Very easy to use and understand. Loads of options and configurations you can optimize for your particular needs.
• Instance replacement. We have had an issue with one unit due to some hardware failure. Barracuda was amazing on getting this replaced quickly and getting us back on track.

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.

• You can't define backup systems to just go to the cloud, it has to be stored locally as well, which eats up the local storage.
• These appliances are high-priced for a small amount of storage and if you want to upgrade, you buy a new appliance. There's no replacing hard drives, you basically move up $5K for each 2Tb and replace the entire appliance each time. It's not a healthy model for growth.

Incentivized

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

Love the units

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

Dashboards and interfaces within Barracuda Backup are very easy to navigate, with clear success/warnings shown. Setting up backup jobs is probably one of the most simplest tasks - compared to competitors we trialed. Trouble shooting backup issues is also simple due to clear errors (VSS errors shown in a understandable format for example)

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

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.

They are always quick to get you routed to a tech support person and always get follow up after contacting them. Last experience was amazing, she adjusted my boxes and they perform even better. I cannot say enough about the support. We had some trouble with one of the windows servers leaving the volume shadow copy out there and would fail. They worked with us to adjust and get working. After that it has been months since I have had to do anything with the server to keep the backups running.

Incentivized

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

Work on a backup agent for Mac OS X or any Apple OS.

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.

The time necessary to manage Barracuda Backups is leaps and bounds superior to Backup Exec. Backup Exec has tons of great features but required constant maintenance. In the end we just wanted the ability to easily schedule, set retention periods and the ability to backup and restore. Barracuda does this exceptionally well.

Incentivized

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

• 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.

• It is much lower priced than the alternate solution we where thinking about purchasing.
• It was initially a much more cost-effective solution until they changed their cost model making the ROI go down over the last 2 years.
• It saved our districts, that we on-boarded, the cost of new hardware. The deduplication factor kept the total size down for new adds.

Incentivized