Bacula Enterprise vs. Veritas NetBackup

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

Backuping complex infrastructures (VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle, and MSSQL databases, etc.). Regarding product price, it's not the most affordable for small businesses, but it can handle nearly all infrastructures and systems. With good training people, it's a Swiss knife of company data backup, no stress about keeping backups in a safe place!

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 activity monitor allows me to easily see if there are issues with backup jobs or the environment.
• Community support for NBU is very good. I've been able to research issues with ease and find other users that have been in similar situations.
• Policy management for backups is very easy and there are lots of options.

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.

• Admin console
• SAP HANA application Templates should also be introduced instead of scripting
• SAP MAXDB application template should also be introduced
• Tape Management need improvement
• MOBILE connectivity is missing
• Admin console is so simple it should be more funcky or stylish
• Small database should also be considered for backup

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

Veritas continues to keep up with the backup game. There virtual machine backup capabilities are now top notch, and I believe they will prove valuable when our cloud presence demands a backup solution.

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

NetBackup provides a complete, flexible data protection solution for a variety of platforms. The platforms include Microsoft Windows, UNIX, and Linux systems. NetBackup lets you back up, archive, and restore files, folders or directories, and volumes or partitions that reside on your computer.
During a backup or an archive, the client sends backup data across the network to a NetBackup server. The NetBackup server manages the type of storage that is specified in the backup policy. During a restore, users can browse, then select the files and directories to recover.

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.

Veritas support is very prompt and the acknowledgement/followup is hugely appreciable. They go deep to the issue and provide you satisfactory solutions. Creating ticket in portal is also very easy, does not adhere to severity priority, even if Sev2 response is very quick.

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 software versus the appliance is about the same, the appliance is more convenient in the fact that it is an all in one solution. Using veritas netbackup you have to build out a backup environment with multiple media servers and a storage target for offloading to disk or offloading to tape. Using the appliance versus using just the software means you don't have to build out an environment as it comes with the appliance.

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.

• When data is lost, we are able to quickly restore and return to normal business.
• When an application upgrade fails we are able to go back to a known good state.
• Large restores are slow at times, so be sure to plan for this in your recovery point objective.

Incentivized