Bacula Enterprise vs IDrive

• 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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• Offers a cloud and a local backup option from the same app.
• Fast upload speed.
• It keeps old files forever, versioning, which helps protect against ransomware.
• Can backup as a disc image.
• Can search and restore for lost data. Makes finding lost files way easier than other solutions.
• You can choose which folders to backup.

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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 used to send your backed up data overnight on a hard drive (if you needed it). Now, they only have an option to download. I love that you can download your data if you need it. That is great, but I would still love the option to ship an actual hard drive because in some cases there is too much data and downloading it all could take days.
• The UI could use an update/refresh.
• If you are not tech-savvy it's not super obvious how to set things up. It would be helpful for some it were simplified in some aspects.

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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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• iDrive has saved us money as their pricing structure is fair and they allow multiple devices to be backed up under the same account - where others do not.
• iDrive has saved us time as we no longer have to manually back up and sync files on our computers to external drives.
• iDrive has lessened the burden of stress. We no longer worry that we may lose critical data that can no longer be recovered.

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