Bacula Enterprise vs Carbonite Server

• 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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• Carbonite Evault allows for easy management of backups. Once the system is integrated there is minimal hands on time. The system is smart enough to email you if there is an issue to give you the opportunity to fix it before it becomes a larger issue.
• Carbonite Evault does restores very well also. Our favorite restores are the BMR (Bare Metal Restores). This type of back up allows you to restore the entire server configuration to a brand new box.
• Carbonite Evault does a good job of allowing you to schedule backups when it is convenient to you with little impact on your bandwith.

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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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• The backup report really needs improvement. It is really pathetic, as it gives wrong information. It is not suitable for auditing.
• The Exchange DAG backup should support instead of configuring each exchange server.
• Cloud infrastructure supports a lot of AWS and Azure instances that are coming up.

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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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• For a small firm, it has outsourced an important element to support our business continuity.
• Email archiving was something we couldn't keep up with an EVault type of solution. We have more control of our file storage size than email, so we felt we were paying too much to archive spam and solicitations than important business communication. We went to a Google solution which was extremely cost effective and with more features.

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