Bacula Enterprise vs Veeam Backup & Replication

• 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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• Creates a working VM copy of your VM servers
• Backup and replications are very quick once you have run it the first time. I replicated new servers that had a 127GB drive in less than 15 min because it only backs up the data, not the entire drive.
• If a backup or replication fails, you can set it to try again and that usually works. I have most of the mine set to retry 3 times.
• If there is a problem like a backup failed it will email you so you don't have to babysit it.

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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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• Not easy to find on the homepage.
• It's very hard to find prices, which is a big deterrent to me as a buyer.
• High barrier to entry for prices for very small companies. I'd rather pay than use the free option, but it's prohibitively expensive for me as a 1-person company.

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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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• In a business model were one have several deployment types, e.g. acceptance, production, load tests, with recurrent new releases to deploy, or software development environments based on VDI, with developers constantly experimenting tools or testing their development, in case of disaster, rebuild the infrastructure may take a lot of time with significant losses if a quick restore of a healthy environment is not possible.
• Organizations vulnerable to ransomware might find a huge burden to rebuild a whole infrastructure if backup policies and tools are missing.
• To Public sector ought to provide access to public data or archives, backup/restore and disaster recovery capabilities is paramount and the lack of according tools and policies may lead to unrecoverable losses.

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