Bacula Enterprise vs Barracuda Backup

• 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.

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• Quickness to deploy. You will not need an expert to get this up and running.
• Extremely intuitive interface: Brand new techs can pick this up without much training.
• Global Accessibility: The cloud interface allows administrators to access their backups from everywhere for quick restores after hours.

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• 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.

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• In some of the older version of the software, drilling down to restore a single files was quite the process. It's still a little slow to this day, but improvements have been made.
• It would be nice to have the ability to spin up a virtual machine directly on the backup appliance in the event of a failed server. At current time you need a Hyper-v or VMWare environment to restore a failed machine to.
• Once you put the device in cloud control mode, some of your options are limited when you log directly into the local appliance. I personally would like to see all the options remain the same so I can administer the device the same remotely and I would sitting in front of it.

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• Quite transparently for the applications to allow online backup and guaranteed enough confidence due to its efficient algorithms of verification of media and blocks.
• The cost of purchasing and updating the annual support is very low compared to other "Veeam and Backup Exec" tools that I analyzed in the pre-project phase.

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• We've had a couple situations where we've had to pull data back down from the BBS cloud and while it can take a while sometimes, we haven't had an issue where we haven't been able to restore something that we needed. Overall it has been very reliable.
• We've had to implement two other backup systems in addition to Barracuda Backup and dedicate our BBSs to just mission-critical data because we're size-locked in our appliances. Upgrading to larger models is not financially viable at the moment and we can't expand their internal storage or point them to an iSCSI share or likewise. We brought in other systems to handle non-critical and virtual data because of those storage limitations.

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