Bacula Enterprise vs. Veeam Data Platform

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

Veeam Data Platform is best suited in environments that fall under its compatible applications, which it backs up. Any sized business could benefit. The ease of use and metrics are a breeze and the learning curve is low. However, if you're using hypervisors, products that have no support by Veeam Data Platform, then clearly wouldn't be a great fit. Their workaround for this by using OS level backups for baremetal deployments but increases the risk of failure when doing restores.

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

• Veeam stands out among backup solutions because of its ability to work with almost any storage type. For example, only a small portion of backup solutions will support catalyst stores, Veeam does.
• Veeam is extremely flexible when it comes to setting it up. I had a network recently that limited ethernet connectivity between the Veeam VM and the backup repository and Veeam handled it easily.
• Day-to-day use of Veeam is very simple. It is easy to train our technicians to use it proficiently in a very short amount of time.
• Our Veeam VMs don't have issues very often, but the one or two times I have called for support, they answered right away, and the technicians assisting us were knowledgeable about their products.

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.

• It should recommend the most secure method of backup methods to ensure immutability.
• It should maximize SnapMirror technology when using a NetApp as a backup target to replicate backups to CVO targets.
• It should provide a centralized dashboard for backing up all PaaS services in Azure.

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

The platform has consistently delivered strong performance, reliability, and innovative features that align well with our data protection needs. Its robust capabilities in backup, recovery, and cloud integration have significantly improved our operational efficiency and disaster recovery planning. The only reason for not giving a full 10 would be our ongoing evaluation of emerging technologies and solutions to ensure we are maximizing our IT investments. Overall, Veeam Data Platform has proven to be an invaluable asset to our organization.

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

If you are familiar with most Windows software UIs, there should be no issue learning Veeam. Even better if you're already familiar with backup strategies, &c., since all of that is integrated and possible. I doubt my grandmother could use it, but she's not the target audience. If you've been in IT for a bit, this is very usable.

Incentivized

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

The Veeam Backup & Replication solution is up and running every time you need it as it was planned. In more than 3 years that we have been using the product every night, it might have failed or presented an error once or twice, so the availability percentage is almost at 100%.

Incentivized

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

Veeam does a good job with backing up our servers in a timely manner. We are still at the beginning of our Veeam use and are pleased with the speed at which we can access the system as well as the backups and restore points. Veeam is definitely superior to our previous backup system in terms of speed and accessibility

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 support team has never asked me to jump through silly hoops or waste time on pointless exercises. They seem to truly have a handle on what may be wrong. In fact, when we were having trouble getting our license renewal setup (because of yet another license migration at Veeam) a support incident got us connected to the right people to get our renewal done in time.

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.

I rated the in-person training an 8 because it was generally effective and provided a solid foundation for understanding the Veeam Data Platform. The instructors were knowledgeable and engaged, making the sessions interactive. However, I felt that some topics could have been covered in more depth, and additional hands-on exercises would have further reinforced the learning experience. Overall, it was a positive training session that adequately prepared attendees for using the product, but there's room for improvement.

Incentivized

I gave it a rating of 7 because, although the online training offered valuable content and covered the essential aspects of the Veeam Data Platform, it lacked interactivity and opportunities for direct engagement with instructors. This made it challenging to ask questions or delve deeper into specific topics. Additionally, some sections felt a bit rushed, which could hinder a comprehensive understanding of more complex features. Overall, while the training was useful, improvements in interactivity and pacing could elevate the experience significantly.

Incentivized

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

When deploying Veeam, be sure you have your environment right-sized. While it is not a big deal to increase capacity later, it will make a difference if you are trying to run Veeam on instances/VMs that are not appropriately sized on CPU and Memory requirements.

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.

Commvault is a standard backup platform for Enterprise backups, but we have no need for its extensive client abilities or the staff for the vast infrastructure that is required to use it. Cohesity is a truly fantastic system, but it is too far for larger companies than the one that I work for. Its cost also makes it prohibitive for SME's like us. Norton Backup was so long ago, I don't know if it even exists. It was difficult to use, had very slow recovery times, and I don't miss it at all.

Incentivized

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

In terms of scalability for our company, Veeam was able to cover our backup needs with ease. They have options for even more individualized backup if we were to need them; i.e. if a specific workstation needs its own independent backup. We have not used these resources yet, but I am confident they will be beneficial to our company in the near future.

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.

• When Veeam is running well, I don't need to babysit it at all; I just read the email reports and am done.
• When it doesn't work, Veeam consumes entire days getting everything working again.
• Veeam has significantly improved how we test new software by enabling easy duplication of existing resources to different platforms.

Incentivized