Bacula Enterprise vs. NAKIVO Backup & Replication

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

NAKIVO covers all features that we expect and demand from a backup software while keeping the management interface intuitive and straightforward. We can bet on its reliability and, in case we need to prove, there is an easy-to-use mock recovery option that allows VMs to be run directly from the backup (saves space on the virtualization datastore) and connected to dedicated recovery-test network.

• 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

• Can be installed natively on nas appliances leveraging the use of underutilized appliances. No need to install the software on Windows or Linux Servers.
• Backup natively Vmware Virtual Machines and File Shares (you need to buy the right license modules).
• Destination storage for backups (or of the backup copies) can be Microsoft shares, Amazon S3, Wasabi, Backblaze and remotely to other sites using their transporter vm.
• To not overload the system with overlapping jobs, they can be chained one after the other.
• Rapid add/remove/reorder priority of vm to backup and their backup archive. Jobs can be easily changed or chained.
• Quick support service

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.

• Backups have the option of "screenshot verification". Screenshot verification doesn't always work for us when our vmtools is out of date. If we are on an older version of VMware and that version of vmtools is up to date, NAKIVO still thinks it is out of date.

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

It is a product that contains most of the features of its big competitors but at an affordable price for small businesses. In addition, the support is very good even if they only have support in English. Another important factor is its compatibility with NAS devices, which greatly simplifies deployment. The implementation is simple and in a matter of minutes you can define the first copy Jobs

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

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is very easy to set up. I did it by myself, and it went perfectly. Online documents are very well written, and also the tech support asked to help me set it up. I want to do it by myself and the setup process is very easy to do. The connection to your VM and servers is very easy to do.

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.

The support is fast and perfect. If u have any questions, you can contact the support team via mail or chat and you always get a fast answer. You can also find a lot of help in the FAQ in the help center to resolve your problems. Anytime I had to contact the support, they helped me and solved my problem.

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

It is very easy to do in all the formats in which it is implemented, whether as an appliance, in a windows machine, or an implementation in NAS. I only use the appliance one, but I have tried all of them in trial mode to know which one interested me more.

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.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a cost-effective solution without compromising on features and functionality. I selected NAKIVO Backup & Replication to benefit from its cost-effectiveness, user-friendly interface, versatile platform support, performance optimization, advanced features, and storage efficiency.

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.

• One of our contributors has permanently deleted worksheets from our file server. From Nakivo, we were able to recover all the data in less than 10 minutes.
• An authentication server was encrypted by ransomware, through NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we recover the entire server within 1 hour.

Incentivized