Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review There are few scenarios that it's not well suited for as long as it's either VMware or Agent Based installations. I have not had success with directly backing up a non-Windows file share. I would definitely test the product first if you are not planning to directly backup through an agent.
Read full review Pros Bacula has great plugins that work very accurately Bacula is very simple to use, with a user-friendly web interface that facilitates operation. Bacula performs the backups very accurately which is clearly noticed when a restore is performed Its ease of use helps in training new support team members Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Our team always points out the same problems, I believe that, today, is our biggest complaint: The interface (both graphical and the CLI) still needs improvement. There is no mobile app to manage backups and restores from smartphones Manual installation is time consuming. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Love the units
Read full review Usability This is a hard question. Usability for whom ? For someone who is very comfortable at the command line and willing to put in the time to learn Bacula Enterprise's configuration syntax, it's very usable. Just don't expect to be an expert immediately.
Read full review The front-end webpages are basic without to much clutter which makes finding what you are trying to do fairly easy.
Read full review Support Rating They're excellent, fast to respond and knowledgeable. I can't fault the support provided at all. On every occasion that we've had a need to contact them during our evaluation, installation, and use of Bacula Enterprise, they've always given us the help that we required. The responses they provide are detailed and we always feel that they've taken the time to read and understand our issue and give a full and personalized answer.
Read full review 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.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating Bacula Systems and especially Bacula Brazil were extremely attentive and served us very well, making all implementations or changes work perfectly
Read full review Work on a backup agent for Mac OS X or any Apple OS.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I used CTERA almost from the time they started up. In short, it was very easy to use but configuration was limited; and in the end the agents were troublesome and I could not restore files. They had one person on staff who was terrific with tech support, when he left support became difficult and I lost confidence. Acronis was my first experience with a bare-metal recovery operation and it was terrific. Really saved the day. I would still be using it except the licensing was difficult and expensive and the software wasn't Linux friendly.
Read full review I'm much happier with how Barracuda lays out their console and user interface. Acronis is a great product and you do get what you expect. But to have a the learning curve personally cut by at least 50% is a great thing to have when it comes to training new members to the IT team and getting them up to speed of our procedures.
Read full review Return on Investment Our Disaster Recovery policy in regards to backups and archiving is made possible because of our use of Bacula Enterprise. TCO is very low as the yearly subscription is very competitively priced. Management of the software is very low so we don't have to spend hours maintaining our backups. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots