Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Barracuda Backup

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

Incentivized

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

• Cheap storage of backup data.
• Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.

Incentivized

• Set and Forget. I rarely have to touch the Backup Servers. Once you specify your criteria, you really don't need to change it unless you have a physical change.
• Alerts. When there are issues such as files failing to backup or a directory no longer present, you get an email giving you all the information you need. In addition you will typically get contacted by support about it.
• Recovery is very simple. The restore browser is very good and it's just easy to find and restore data when you need it.

Incentivized

• Sometime due to slow drives there are operation failure noticed by us in testing
• Cost of restoring data is high and if you have regular restoring them it is not good option and slow as well.
• While we were setting up the system we took some support from AWS and in many cases their answers were not up to the mark.

Incentivized

• The pricing solution has gone from allowing on-premise ownership to forced cloud extortion. Basically, if you buy now you will be ok, but those of us who "owned" our solution previously are now forced to subscribe to the cloud model or be stuck with a brick.
• Speed of recovery could be improved.

Incentivized

Love the units

Incentivized

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

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)

Incentivized

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

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

Incentivized

Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.

Incentivized

Each backup solution has its pros and cons, and each customer has their needs, and budget constraints. Barracuda Backup has helped us dramatically in the area of being able to provide customers a cost-effective solution, that's easy to manage and is one of those things you're not having to check on daily, or switch out backup tapes, or hard drives.

Incentivized

• We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class.
• Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines.
• Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration.

Incentivized

• Countless positive impacts from being able to restore lost or deleted files - or even restoring an entire server.
• Being able to restore files for users and allowing them to recover lost work or preventing them from having to redo files at any level is priceless. You can't accurately measure lost time of employees having to recreate files. Especially things like 3D drawings and multi-sheet spreadsheet.

Incentivized