What users are saying about
31 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.8 out of 100
Based on 31 reviews and ratings
137 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 6.6 out of 100
Based on 137 reviews and ratings
Feature Set Ratings
- Bacula Enterprise ranks higher in 1 feature set: Data Center Backup
Data Center Backup

7.1
Bacula Enterprise
71%

6.9
Veritas Backup Exec
69%
Bacula Enterprise ranks higher in 9/14 features
Bacula Enterprise ranks higher in 9/14 features
Universal recovery

9.1
91%
1 Rating

7.0
70%
17 Ratings
Live recovery

6.9
69%
8 Ratings

5.2
52%
15 Ratings
Recovery verification

6.5
65%
18 Ratings

8.0
80%
18 Ratings
Business application protection

3.0
30%
2 Ratings

8.0
80%
16 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations

8.2
82%
23 Ratings

7.5
75%
19 Ratings
Incremental backup identification

7.9
79%
23 Ratings

7.6
76%
20 Ratings
Backup to the cloud

9.9
99%
12 Ratings

8.3
83%
12 Ratings
Deduplication and file compression

6.9
69%
17 Ratings

6.3
63%
14 Ratings
Snapshots

7.9
79%
14 Ratings

7.7
77%
14 Ratings
Flexible deployment

3.9
39%
20 Ratings

5.3
53%
15 Ratings
Management dashboard

4.4
44%
20 Ratings

5.8
58%
18 Ratings
Platform support

7.2
72%
23 Ratings

5.8
58%
17 Ratings
Retention options

7.2
72%
23 Ratings

8.1
81%
16 Ratings
Encryption

10.0
100%
14 Ratings

6.3
63%
11 Ratings
Attribute Ratings
- Bacula Enterprise is rated higher in 5 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Likelihood to Renew, Usability, Support Rating, Implementation Rating
Likelihood to Recommend

9.9
Bacula Enterprise
99%
23 Ratings

5.7
Veritas Backup Exec
57%
22 Ratings
Likelihood to Renew

10.0
Bacula Enterprise
100%
3 Ratings

1.0
Veritas Backup Exec
10%
3 Ratings
Usability

8.5
Bacula Enterprise
85%
4 Ratings

1.0
Veritas Backup Exec
10%
1 Rating
Support Rating

9.8
Bacula Enterprise
98%
25 Ratings

2.6
Veritas Backup Exec
26%
5 Ratings
Implementation Rating

8.0
Bacula Enterprise
80%
1 Rating

3.0
Veritas Backup Exec
30%
1 Rating
Likelihood to Recommend
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise is not the easiest backup software to work with--you are expected to be competent at the command line and editing complex configuration files, even if you mostly use the web GUI for day-to-day operations. However, study is rewarded--you can do many very complex things. Easy things may not always be easy, but very hard things are possible (unlike many competitors that make easy things easy and hard things impossible).
I would not recommend Bacula to someone who just wants a quick plug and play solution; but in my opinion your backups and disaster recovery system shouldn't be plug and play - that's a great way to feel good about a solution that won't actually work for you when it's needed!
Director of IT, McLean Imaging Center
McLean HospitalHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees
Veritas Backup Exec
Backup Exec works well generally in most environments or situations. The licensing can potentially be a nightmare, but manageable if you have a decent reseller. Backing up and restoring from physical tapes which is not all that common is not as reliable as when backing up and restoring from datastores that reside on hard drives or digital media. It does a good job with large or small backup jobs. Backing up and managing SQL backups requires additional licenses and be a bit clunky. If you are very careful (which you should be anyway) and document as you build these backups you will get better at managing them. Regarding a virtual environment, I have limited experience in that arena, but have done it. Backup Exec can backup VMware environments, but honestly we moved to Unitrends to backup our VM's and are much happier with the backup process. However, restoring a VM in Unitrends can be tedious compared to Backup Exec.

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Education Management Company, 501-1000 employeesPros
Bacula Enterprise
- 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.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Higher Education Company, 5001-10,000 employeesVeritas Backup Exec
- Manage agent based backups - It is easy to schedule and monitor backups. Verifying backups is done for all jobs. Backup performance is excellent.
- Provide a wide ranging contingent of backup options - Despite providing a dizzying array of backup options, it is easy to schedule individual or recurring jobs.
- Integrates well with our Active Directory - Restoring even individual Active Directory objects is possible.
Network Engineer
EPMG-Emergency Physicians Medical GroupHospital & Health Care, 501-1000 employees
Cons
Bacula Enterprise
- 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.
IT Infrastructure Engineer
DPD IrelandTransportation/Trucking/Railroad, 501-1000 employees
Veritas Backup Exec
- Could provide better license management from an inventory perspective. How many licenses do I have?.. etc.
- When Backup Exec backs up itself it should not select iSCSI backup targets by default. The result is recursive data backup ending in the loss of storage capacity.
- I'm struggling to come up with another con.
Division Network Support Specialist
The Salvation ArmyNon-Profit Organization Management, 501-1000 employees
Pricing Details
Bacula Enterprise
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—Bacula Enterprise Editions & Modules
—
Additional Pricing Details
—Veritas Backup Exec
General
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
$0
Veritas Backup Exec Editions & Modules
Edition
Veritas Backup Exec | Contact sales team |
---|
- none
Additional Pricing Details
—Likelihood to Renew
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise 10.0
Based on 3 answers
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.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Hospitality Company, 11-50 employeesVeritas Backup Exec
Veritas Backup Exec 1.0
Based on 3 answers
This software is a mess in my brutally honest opinion. I've spent more time babysitting this software while backing up 20 servers than I did with Veeam backing up 600+. I've had multiple jobs run fine for weeks at a time that just randomly fail out of the blue for seemingly no reason whatsoever. There's no intuitive way to chain jobs, so automation becomes somewhat more problematic if certain jobs depend on other jobs. The forever incremental feature feels tacked on since the merge operation merges all your incremental jobs into the most recent backup and doesn't have the option set a limit on how long to keep your point in time restores.

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employeesUsability
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise 8.5
Based on 4 answers
It still has a lot of flaws to overcome, especially in the area of user friendliness. Searching and filtering is quite cumbersome. Once you find the job you from which you want to restore, be sure to write that job number down because you won't be able to quickly find the job again without it during a recovery.

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Logistics and Supply Chain Company, 1001-5000 employeesVeritas Backup Exec
Veritas Backup Exec 1.0
Based on 1 answer
It can do a lot of things on paper and sounds terrific, but in practice it doesn't do any of them well. It can easily be sold to non-technical minds and C-levels, but of all the backup solutions I've used in the last 15 years of my career, Backup Exec is easily the least fault tolerant. Unless this software is a sunk cost and you're on a shoestring budget, I recommend almost anything else. Jobs fail often with obscure error codes and the KB articles in the Veritas support portal are a mess. Within 30 days of a fresh deployment I've logged more tickets with their support than I did in 3 years with Veeam.

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employeesSupport Rating
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise 9.8
Based on 25 answers
We have always been very well served by Bacula Enterprise support. The response time is excellent, and any doubts or problems are resolved quickly and easily, avoiding complications and the evolution of problems that could arise. Only praise for Bacula Enterprise's service and support. The monitoring of the entire process from acquisition to implementation was very well done.
Innovation Director
Prefeitura Municipal de Aparecida de GoiâniaGovernment Administration, 10,001+ employees
Veritas Backup Exec
Veritas Backup Exec 2.6
Based on 5 answers
In the few instances of having to contact support, our overall outcome was always good. They would have received a better score if the wait time was less, but I attribute this to the timing of support calls - it was during the previous owner's time. We have not had to open a support ticket since Veritas Backup Exec took the product back over.
IT Manager
PrecixAutomotive, 201-500 employees
Implementation Rating
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise 8.0
Based on 1 answer
Ensure the backup traffic goes through separate traffic as the other environment.
ESCRYPT IT Teamlead Bochum
ESCRYPT GmbhInformation Technology & Services, 201-500 employees
Veritas Backup Exec
Veritas Backup Exec 3.0
Based on 1 answer
It was pretty straightforward.

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employeesAlternatives Considered
Bacula Enterprise
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.
Director of Information Technology
Architectural Design Consultants, Inc.Architecture & Planning, 11-50 employees
Veritas Backup Exec
If your company is looking at changing solutions or currently does not have any, Veritas Backup Exec is the way to go. Do yourself a favor and try the 60 day trial, you won't be disappointed! Very simple to use and has a great GUI, much better than what the competition has to offer.

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesReturn on Investment
Bacula Enterprise
- 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.
Manage Network and Virtualization
Claudino SARetail, 501-1000 employees
Veritas Backup Exec
- Backups by their very nature are difficult to quantify when it comes to ROI. Any monies spent should be seen more as insurance . If you never have to claim on it then that is the best outcome. Backup Exec gives you comfort that you can meet any downtime recovery targets set by your business and this is how to benchmark your solution.
- Conduct regular DR tests and your this will be your ROI.

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Consumer Goods Company, 201-500 employees