Bacula Enterprise vs Datto SIRIS

The Bacula Enterprise tool is recommended for use by any companies that need a data backup and recovery solution that is adaptable and scalable, regardless of the size of the data and the company. The installation of the tool will not impact the company's policies and there are great possibilities for integration with the IT environment and tools. A less appropriate scenario is if your company does not have a team with minimal backup experience, but this is remedied by the excellent support offered.

Datto is a fantastic option for smaller businesses who don't have as large of a budget. It might work well for larger businesses as well, but the features are not exactly on par with more prevalent backup solutions. So, that should be kept in mind while determining a good fit for a company. But if selling a backup solution is met with push back, this can be a great option to give a good working backup solution. It offers the main features solutions should have, so it's definitely not a compromise. Just keep in mind the features it does not offer.

• 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

• Simple agent setup for new machines to be protected. A new machine can be setup on the server in under a minute whether it be a Linux or Windows based machine.
• Local virtualization on the Datto is quick to start up. After a physical problem with a server I had the machine locally virtualized on the Datto before users had a chance to report service issues to me.
• Nothing to do on my end to get backups shifted to offsite data center. Schedules are setup for each machine or group of machines and I sleep well knowing all our backups are safely stored offsite.

• 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.

• Initial backup sync: The downside to the cloud backup is that, if you have a lot of data, you need an external hard drive to seed to the cloud. And you usually have to request this after you've already got everything else working.
• Unsyncing: We have pretty decent bandwidth, but with 8TB of data, we'd get syncing issues with the cloud servers every 3 months or so. The only way to address it was to request another external drive and resync it, but that also meant losing the older data.
• Availability and support: Datto only operates through MSPs and VARs, and will not help you directly without putting in a ticket with your provider. This causes delays, and extra epenses, and if you grow beyond the need for an MSP, you have to keep them around for at least that piece.

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.

I trust the product and service and am satisfied with the direction of the company

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.

Usability is great. The web interface is simple and easy to use. While various options are available for client backups, it is very easy to re-use settings of the existing client, so adding new clients is a very fast process. Configuration of the agent on the client-side cannot be easier as well. Datto dashboard provides an overview of the client status, and email notifications can be configured for various events.

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.

My specific example or reason for this rating goes back to a need for support after a client on this platform has a fire. In a nutshell, Datto had no idea how to BMR the image back to the server correctly, and as a result, the RAID on the server was lost, due to the Datto BDR environment not being able to see the RAID card, and the support technician knowing how to inject drivers.

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.

Bacula Systems and especially Bacula Brazil were extremely attentive and served us very well, making all implementations or changes work perfectly

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.

Datto seemed to be better than other vendors I trialed, and I inherited an Alto device, so it was easy to stay with them. I also assumed the backups had been working with the previous contractor, but it turns out they had been failing for months and no one knew it.

• 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.

• We've saved some money by consolidating backups offsite to the one appliance and letting it store backups in one location offsite, rather than trying to maintain several different platforms or connections.
• Negatively, since the appliance doesn't expand in storage, we've got sunk costs into this unit and will have to move to something else to continue growing. I work in healthcare and we can't just purge charts and stop backing up information, I've got to expand my ability to back up that information.