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 Individuals (SOHO), families and SMBs, who have a tight budget for offsite critical company data backup are well suited to this product. Especially if you want your data to be hosted locally (Australia in our case). Larger companies, with higher requirements and budgets would be better served elsewhere. Especially when you consider the poor technical support. Although, to be fair, their poor support may just be issues with their Pro/SMB products, as opposed to their enterprise products. However, if that is the case it's a pretty poor show/indicator still.
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 Code42 is the most affordable backup system offering unlimited storage that I could find. I came from SOS Online Backup, which I ultimately decided to drop after my monthly rate for their unlimited plan increased by 20x. With Code42's unlimited storage option, I don't have to worry about the fact that my backups are significant in space. As a photographer with thousands of images at stake, I need to run large backups often. Code42 runs continuously and silently in the background of my desktop computer. It is truly "set and go", so I don't have to think about it when I'm away. It runs until the designated drive has been fully backed up to my cloud storage. It will then automatically email me once the backup is complete (or, it will email me if it encounters any errors). Customer service is above par. Anytime I need help, a chat agent is available (chat is my communication preference), they are always friendly, and go above and beyond to resolve my needs. 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 The CrashPlan program installed on your computer is Java-based vs. a native application. While this makes development for CrashPlan easier, there are a lot of drawbacks to Java programs including more resources usage, less stability, and overall more clunky interface. While this was also in the Pros category - CrashPlan is an extremely powerful and flexible program, which adds a great deal of complexity. Setting up CrashPlan isn't always a simple procedure, and depending on the complexity of your backup set, can take a while to tinker around with the settings to get everything to work properly. The CrashPlan desktop program consists of a Java program front end, as well as a backend service - there are times when the backend service will crash, and the front end Java program will refuse to load. Typically, restarting the service or restarting the computer will resolve the issue, but sometimes more in-depth troubleshooting is required. Perhaps one of the biggest downsides to CrashPlan is its price - at $10/month/computer CrashPlan is more than double the price of some existing backup services such as Backblaze (priced at $50/year/computer). To add salt to the wound, about a year and a half ago, CrashPlan discontinued their consumer options - which were very reasonably priced at $60/year for a single computer or a family plan priced at $150/year for up to 10 computers. When these options were discontinued, the cost of backing up with CrashPlan was effectively doubled for the same feature set. Along with the previous example, CrashPlan had the option to back up to a remote machine on a different network with a free Crashplan account. This option was eliminated when the consumer line of services were discontinued. While the backup service provided by CrashPlan are still first in class, the above two controversial changes have broken some trust between CrashPlan and its clients. 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 No other product works as well.
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 Overall, it is simple to use, lightweight, and effective.
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 Friendly and knowledgeable support team available to assist with this product. Code 42 (formerly CrashPlan) offers unlimited storage options for reasonable costs, so you really can't go wrong with this product. They have been a reliable resource for our company, and I would recommend to others looking for an easy setup with unlimited storage.
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 Very easy to follow the install guide.
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 Unitrends is our primary backup solution here at my place of employment, and I have no complaints. It does on-prem backups to a storage pool and with that, we chose not to also use
Unitrends could storage as the cost was pretty high. Crashplan has a low cost and we were familiar with it. We found a great fit for Crashplan at a remote office with a web server, file share server, and a Domain Controller in addition to the
Unitrends solution there. I also set up CrashPlan for a nonprofit org, as well as a Health foods store. I felt like I could stand behind the CrashPlan solution with my experience with it, in places like these where every dollar mattered.
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 Tremendous cost savings as the amount of data you backup doesn't impact cost. One flat rate! Implementation time was minimal and requires little to no maintenance. Since installation, I've not had to correct or fix any issues. It just works. We opted to supplement Code42 with another solution that allowed us to backup data to a local repository due to the amount for data that changes in our firm. Read full review ScreenShots