Bacula Enterprise vs. Veeam on IBM Cloud

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 on IBM Cloud is very well suited for doing data backup from the storage environment in the data center. It does this job well with an easy and straightforward user interface. There is minimal learning curve to get started. We wanted to use the cloud for backup instead of expanding storage in the data center and hence went with this solution. We do data recovery on a regular basis and have been able to retrieve data from Veeam backup in a very straightforward manner meeting the recovery time and recovery point objectives

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 program installation is straight forward and uncomplicated.
• Once running it does not put a drain on system resources. After the initial backup subsequent backups are quick.
• It does what it is deigned to do and they have kept it simple for a reason.

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.

• The reporting could use some work. If you have a client who has some serious audit controls in place, you may find yourself creating the report versus depending on the system do that piece for you.
• My complaint would be with the notification emails. They are not configurable and come out regardless of whether a backup set completed or is still running.
• The scheduling is a little clunky. It would be much nicer if the backup could be "continuous" anytime it's connected to the Internet (similar to Carbonite).

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 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

Veeam is very easy to use once fully on-boarded and trained. Part of the reason we can respond to a critical situation swiftly is that it is so easy to use. We did take 2 years to be fully comfortable with the product as we tested it with others, but once we committed to Veeam, there was no question about it.

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

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.

At the moment I cannot say anything bad about the overall provided services. It's holding me back to put the mark even higher as other cloud solutions have their advantages as well, so I can't rate this one higher than competitor ones. However the experience is really positive to the moment and it has delivered always.

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

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 capabilities that can be found on Veeam on IBM Cloud are [effective] and very reliable to [most] businesses. The data backup through the Veeam on IBM Cloud services is easy and very promising and the ability to protect data from various cyber data threats is amazing. Veeam on IBM Cloud also can easily generate great data reports and [is excellent on] data retrieving.

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.

• We solved a problem where we needed a backup for some remote clients and paying the cost for local backup was not feasible.
• allows us to put a solid backup and recovery solution in a client with very little monthly cost.
• Business backup and recovery, disaster recovery, hybrid data protection (onsite and cloud), server and workstation backup.

Incentivized