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April 28, 2021
Bacula Enterprise is used across our IT organization, but we do have another product being used in the UK. We backup a variety of systems using different backup options. We have Linux servers, Windows servers, and these are a mix of physical and virtual -- both VMware and Hyper-V. The virtual infrastructure is about 95%. We do a BMR backup once each month, full backups daily of VMware virtual servers (both Linux and Windows), a full weekly for any non-virtual server, and incremental daily in-between.
- It gets virtual servers snapshotted quickly so they can go back to work.
- Recovery from virtual server snapshots, while quite a bit unfriendly in the GUI, do work, and work well.
- Not needing an agent on the server being backed up is a much anticipated strength.
- Bacula support personnel have worked with us to address some of our complaints, but I still find the GUI very cumbersome. It sorts wonderfully for a machine, but not for a human being. It's search capability is also very off and on. You have to learn a lot of tricks to get a search to work the way you want.
- We had a LOT of problems early on with not being able to recover a VMware backup from a BMR job. It took a lot of work and correspondence between our company and Bacula before that was resolved. I find it rather a kluge to have to boot from a PE DVD, reconfigure the system, and then recover, but it does work.
- We are still experiencing issues off and on with restoring selected files from incremental backups. Sometimes it works, other times it does not.
November 11, 2020
We are the McLean Imaging Center--the neuroimaging center at McLean Hospital. McLean maintains the world's largest neuroscientific and psychiatric research program in a private hospital. It is the largest psychiatric facility of Harvard Medical School, an affiliate of Massachusetts General Hospital, and part of Mass General Brigham. The Imaging Center is primarily research, with some clinical duties as well. At the Center we back up ~50 clients and ~1.5 PB to a mix of disk and LTO7 tape. Our primary workload is research neuroimaging data.
- Hyper-competent support staff
- Extreme configurability
- Extensive logging and reporting
- Command line and GUI interface
- Backups storage format is outdated--treats everything, even disk, as if it were a tape.
- No deduplication support in base product.
- Inconsistent support for filesystem snapshots on non-Windows platforms
- Steep learning curve--but rewards learning!
Bacula Enterprise is being used in the university's Rectory, covering all the main systems of the institution.
We perform backups of our systems, stored on tapes and other storage. Backups are performed daily, including full, incremental, and differential backups. Our backups are divided into daily, weekly, and advanced backups, with reduced retention of 7 days for 1 year.
Currently, we use some plugins like MySQL, Postgres, Ldap, Docker, and S3.
We perform backups of our systems, stored on tapes and other storage. Backups are performed daily, including full, incremental, and differential backups. Our backups are divided into daily, weekly, and advanced backups, with reduced retention of 7 days for 1 year.
Currently, we use some plugins like MySQL, Postgres, Ldap, Docker, and S3.
- A robust and reliable solution
- Intuitive Bweb web interface
- Text console administration
- Storage on different devices
- Good compression rate
- Easy restore process
- More reporting options
Bacula Enterprise is a robust backup solution. In addition to allowing complete management of the backup system in a graphic and intuitive way, it has plugins that enhance the backup of specific applications used in our organization. It has greatly optimized our backup work, making the routines more agile and bringing security to the institution's data.
- Intuitive graphical web interface
- Configuration of backup routines made easy
- Specific plugins for different types of applications
- Unlimited dynamic backup size
- Minor difficulties in using web console
May 18, 2020
The BGW Group of companies rely on Bacula Enterprise to ensure that all company servers are backed up on a daily basis. Our environment is a mixture of physical and virtual machines, running both Windows and Linux operating systems, and hosted across multiple data centres. Over the years we have found Bacula Enterprise to be a very robust and flexible product, which easily adapts to our ongoing changes and needs.
- Central management of all clients and jobs.
- Accommodates various backup strategies.
- Support for multiple platforms and media.
- Some may find the setup intimidating, but it's actually very logical.
Bacula Enterprise is the main backup tool of the Municipality of Campinas/BR. We use it for several applications and operating systems.
Our goal is to guarantee backup of structured and unstructured data, something that Bacula does with mastery.
Our goal is to guarantee backup of structured and unstructured data, something that Bacula does with mastery.
- Compatibility with different systems.
- Extensive documentation.
- Proactive support team.
- Rapid deployment.
- Cheap deployment.
- Simple configuration handling.
- Web interface.
- Mobile application.
- Authentication layer.
June 02, 2020
We use Bacula Enterprise on all company network servers, backing up all information.
- Backup VMware virtual machines.
- Backup network servers.
- Backup of PostgreSQL and oracle database.
- Backup of oracle database.
- Backup of file servers.
- I have nothing to complain about.
November 30, 2019
At CloudHQ, we depend on Bacula every day to backup our critical systems. We have a mixed Windows/Linux environment and needed a solution that can span multiple platforms without breaking the bank. More importantly, we needed software that reliably did it's one thing of backing up or restoring our critical data and systems. The Bacula support staff are passionate about their product and it shows in customer service and technical abilities.
- Backs up software from multiple systems.
- Restores software to multiple systems.
- Notifications.
- Reliable.
- A little tricky to set-up at first, but like setting a watch, once you do it its a piece of cake.
August 06, 2019
We use Bacula Enterprise to backup all our physical server environment as well as archiving for our all our virtual environment. In choosing Bacula Enterprise we required a robust, hassle-free and fully supported backup and archiving software. We had used the community Bacula version for a few years before upgrading to the Enterprise version. Having superb support whenever we needed was one of the main reasons for choosing this product.
- Proactive support - Once a year, Bacula will proactively send me a report on how my Bacula Enterprise environment is running and what changes they recommend that I change to optimise my backup environment. I've found this to be extremely helpful and unique as most other companies don't do this.
- Robustness - In the last 10 years this product has caused our company hardly any issues. Once it's setup correctly and to your liking, it hardly needs any maintenance. The only major issue we had was with the community version and once we switched to the Enterprise version this was fixed immediately.
- Support - Their support is second to none. Whenever I've had an issue, big or small, they resolved it within a few hours. In one case where our RAID array failed on the main Bacula drive (using community version), they managed to get our backups up and working in 24 hours. They appreciated the seriousness of the situation and provided the appropriate resources for us to get the job done.
- 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.
November 18, 2019
We are currently centralizing the existing scattered backup solutions into one solution. Due to the number of heterogeneous systems, we strongly need a centralized solution with dependable monitoring, encryption, secure cloud support for off-site backups and support for different environments and operating systems. Bacula's plug-in system provides support for our needs, may it be Windows, Linux, databases, Exchange, etc.
- Good support during the decision phase: PoC with technical assistance and honest answers about what might pose problems.
- Text-based configuration allows for utilization of config management and Git-based change tracking, even with merge-request-approval, if needed.
- Supports all needed operating systems (whereas using os-specific solutions e.g. VSS snapshots on Windows, therefore utilizing the power of registered VSS writers).
- CLI, as well as web management interfaces, are available.
- Dependable job runs: If something goes wrong, the admin will at least know (we had issues with that in another backup solution).
- Multi-cloud capable, with encryption support.
- Extensive documentation provided on nearly every aspect, also covering typical sticking points.
- There is a somewhat steep learning curve, but OTOH, I don't see how a "trivial" config could provide the flexibility and strength Bacula does.
- Finding the right documentation may take some time due to structuring.
October 17, 2019
We deployed Bacula Enterprise to replace our incumbent, commercial, backup vendor after support costs increased significantly and support quality was less than expected. We conducted a PoC first, and were very impressed at the ease of use, scalability, and the effectiveness and responsiveness of the Bacula support team.
Bacula Enterprise is being used in all of our data centers throughout the United States to backup physical servers, VMware, and NAS arrays (NDMP) to deduplicating disk targets and tape.
Bacula Enterprise is being used in all of our data centers throughout the United States to backup physical servers, VMware, and NAS arrays (NDMP) to deduplicating disk targets and tape.
- Standard backups of hosts, whether physical or virtual work very well.
- Restore of individual files or VMs is much faster than our prior solution.
- Easy to script pre or post-backup tasks, in fact, almost anything can be scripted to work in the manner we want. Infinitely flexible!
- Lack of "Archive" type job. (These backup files for long-term retention, then delete the original files, in order to save space or reduce clutter on production systems.
- Config file management can become cluttered or confusing if standards are not adhered to (name by site, platform, etc), however, sheer script-ability and plain text config files instead of a proprietary database to hold configs is also one of the greatest strengths.
October 08, 2019
Bacula Enterprise is used as a main backup tool for the firm, is used to backup virtual machines, file servers, database servers and so on. Due to the flexibility and power of the Bacula Enterprise, we were able to achieve impressive numbers when compared to another tool in the market.
- Extremely flexible and powerful, giving the operator confidence in what is happening.
- Multi-cloud, multi-environment and multi-OS backups in one tool.
- The BWeb interface could be improved.
- It requires operators to have deep Linux knowledge to operate Bacula Enterprise.
September 29, 2019
Bacula Enterprise is being used by one department within the organization. It supports our need to have regular and reliable backups of our data to protect against system failure and user error. We use it to back up data from around 50 systems, both physical and virtual, to disk storage and then to tape for offsite storage.
- 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.
- The configuration can be hard to get started with. It took some time and reading of the documentation to understand how to get Bacula Enterprise to do what we wanted. This can be a hurdle when initially getting started.
- Although the documentation is good, there's a lot of it and it isn't always structured in the best way. When you know what you're looking for it's fine, but when getting started it can be overwhelming.
- Bweb is an optional extra, so without it, you're stuck with text files and command-line tools. This could likely be a turn off for sysadmins who prefer to work in a graphical environment.
- It could do more to support hardware-based LTO encryption. With some web searching it's not too hard to figure out the changes needed to load encryption keys into the drives, but it'd be nice if Bacula Enterprise handled this by itself given it's a fairly fundamental part of tape backup.
- Scripting actions using bconsole is ugly. More could be done to making scripting easier.
October 17, 2019
Bacula is used for backing up all the servers that are relevant for developing our software.
- Bacula is platform independent. We do backups of Linux, Windows, and iOS devices and are able to "cross-recover".
- Bacula makes it easy for us to use tapes for our long term storage.
- We use PostgreSQL for our Bacula repository which gives us the chance to use self-designed scripts for additional information of each backup taken so far.
- Together with PostgreSQL as Bacula repository we would like to get the partitioning of large tables being involved.
December 04, 2019
Bacula Enterprise Edition is used by my organization and our experience with BEE as a solution has been very positive. It has been used to back up about 400TB of data to Onprem Disk/Tape Media and Azure Blob Storage as a target. We use BEE to perform full and incremental backups in our environment.
- NDMP, incremental accelerator.
- Copy/migrate offsite jobs.
- Encryption in transit and at rest.
- Can automate with scripting.
- BWeb GUI can be used to avoid syntax errors.
- Verify jobs after backups.
- Bootstrap files make life a lot easier when doing a restore when the catalog isn't available anymore.
- Plugins (Dedup, Cloud, vSphere etc.)
- Strong development team, provides training for users, and support team is very helpful.
- Product is complex with many resources.
We use Bacula to back up the entire information system of our company.
- NDMP Backups
- vSphere backups
- Files backups
- Complexity of restoring a file from a virtual machine through Fuse
Our company uses Bacula Enterprise to ensure that our servers, projects, and files are being backed up reliably. Our strategy includes making virtual machine backups to facilitate restoring complete systems as well as making file level backups to restore files one-by-one. We also use Bacula Enterprise to back up our active directory database and our Microsoft Exchange email. Bacula Enterprise can be customized to the extreme, and we take advantage of this by creating backup jobs that are exactly suited for each situation -- in some cases we need to keep files for years and in other cases we are only concerned about having a reasonably recent backup. Although Bacula Enterprise could be used on individual user's computers, our disaster recovery plan only requires that our servers be backed up. We do not use tape. Our backups are stored locally to disk and then replicated off-site.
- The ability to restore files is equally as important as backing them up, and this is where Bacula Enterprise really proved itself for me. In my IT career I have used many backup systems and found that the weakest point -- often the failing point -- is restoring files. After switching to Bacula Enterprise and doing some test restores and several real restores I am convinced switching to Bacula Enterprise was the right choice. I also appreciate that restore operations can be done through a simple text console program. I have been in emergency situations where the internet connection was so slow that a GUI would not work and yet I was able to quickly restore the needed files.
- Another great thing about Bacula Enterprise is the licensing structure. I simply don't have to worry about cost when installing a client on yet another machine (other than the cost of storage).
- Last but not least is Bacula Enterprise support. I have used Bacula Enterprise support for installation issues, pro-active check-ups, configuration help, and then even reviewed my company backup policy documentation and made some recommendations. Bacula Enterprise tech support is unlike any other support team I've worked with. They stay familiar with our configuration through pro-active checkups and communicate well when there is a problem ticket. I really feel they are genuinely interested that my backups are working as expected.
- The Bacula Enterprise takes a while to understand and install. I found the terminology that Bacula Enterprise used to be a bit different from what I was used to and I needed to think about our backups in a slightly different way than I was used to. It seemed at first that it was too complex, but actually it is very straightforward and very flexible and very powerful. Looking back, I don't know how I could do without the options I have with Bacula Enterprise.
- Also, although Bacula Enterprise is well documented with manuals, whitepapers, articles and even books, I find it a bit difficult to navigate through all the available information. More than once I've read through an explanation of a feature only to find out that it no longer applies and that I should have read a different paper. I've learned to ask support for the right article to read, but I'd rather see the documentation organized better so I can learn on my own.
- Personally I prefer working with configuration files and text consoles, but if I were looking for a slick graphical user interface, Bacula Enterprise does not have it.
- Bacula Enterprise technical support is excellent, but the ticketing system needs work. One creates a ticket on a web portal but can only follow up on that ticket via email. I would very much like to update the ticket on the website as well as via email.
Bacula Enterprise is being used by our Information Technology department to manage backups for servers supporting our whole University. We have almost 200 backup jobs configured using the Bacula Enterprise software which is backing up servers supporting both the Academic and Administrative areas of the University. We needed a solution that is economical but reliable, and Bacula Enterprises fills that role for us.
- Bacula Enterprise is very configurable. If there is something you want to do, there is most likely a way to do it with Bacula Enterprise.
- Bacula support is very good and fast. It is nice to count on having a support engineer to help you with any problems you may experience.
- Bweb is very useful for people who prefer a web-based interface to manage jobs and manage configuration. You can do pretty much anything in Bweb. Now that we have started using Bweb, I only occasionally configure anything from the command line.
- I recently attended the Bacula Systems Admin I training and found it very helpful.
- I would like to see a few changes to how you manage tapes (volumes). Currently, I regularly do a Postgres query to show all the tapes in the changer that are full. It'd be nice if bconsole would have an easy way to show this.
- Some configuration options could be a little clearer as to what is expected (i.e. I thought MediaType had to be the type of the tape, such as LTO6, but it doesn't, and in fact, has to be different for each storage daemon if you have multiple storage daemons controlled by the same director).
We are using Bacula for our backup jobs across our platforms for a big project. It is being solely used by our technical team to manage, administer and check backups.
- It's very quick and efficient.
- It has a very easy to use CLI (command line interface).
- It's very powerful in a few areas of recovery and customization.
- VM Ware based image backups on-cloud technology.
August 04, 2017
I have been using Bacula Enterprise for 3 years throughout an organization. At our headquarters in "Teresina / PI Brasil" I back up ~ 170 daily backup jobs and in the 226 branch offices in more than 7 Brazilian states (4 daily backup jobs per branch).
My main challenges for backup were to have centralized and monitoring management of headquarters and all branch offices to VM-level backups, compatibility with multiple operating system platforms (Linux, Windows, AIX, Unix ...) and databases (PSQL, Mysql, Oracle, SQLServer).
My main challenges for backup were to have centralized and monitoring management of headquarters and all branch offices to VM-level backups, compatibility with multiple operating system platforms (Linux, Windows, AIX, Unix ...) and databases (PSQL, Mysql, Oracle, SQLServer).
- Back up a very good and simple package of files, including compression and different levels, differential and incremental.
- BWEB's html interface is very good and intuitive for the amount of backup and clients I need to monitor and manage.
- In smaller branch offices, the managers manually trigger the backup "because it varies the time of shutdown of each branch", with tool bconsole I was able to easily customize this drive inside our application, simplifying enough for the end user.
- The vsphere plugin works 100%, could have been more intuitive and practical. For example -To specify that you want to restore a backup of a VM, enter the "where" parameter / because the default value "/ tmp / bacula-restore" would restore the .bmdk files in the plugin client.
- An identification of the name of the virtual machine in the act of restoration and naming for Bacula Systems as "Host Name" would be more intuitive "Guest Name or VM-Name", since Host implies "Host ESXi".
- After running the datastore from a VM, there is no bacula for the backup to continue.
- A compression could have been a multi-thread on the client to make faster, when a document was not available on Bacula Systems roadmap.
May 13, 2019
My organization uses Bacula to perform file-based backups of our production and production support resources. The entire organization is being backed up with varying degrees of granularity - allowing us to tune our backup and restoration schemes without impacting end users negatively. The services are unobtrusive to deploy and run nightly without any interference from a human being.
- Heavily tunable with regards to backend storage, scheduling, and filesets
- Enterprise deployment is straightforward and easy to roll out
- Customer support is top-notch - any question I've ever had has been asked and answered within a few business days.
- Support engineers are very proactive in helping maintain your infrastructure with regards to running reports and checking for system health
- Training programs offered by Bacula are very thorough
- Documentation is fantastic
- Steep learning curve - with high configurability comes lots of reading and trial and error
- Directory tree for configuration tends to get confusing depending on which host is being configured
Bacula Enterprise Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is Bacula Enterprise?
Bacula Enterprise is a modern backup, restore, and disaster recovery solution for medium and large enterprises that does not penalize you for data volume.
Bacula delivers a complete feature set to meet the needs of the most demanding data centers, MSPs and cloud providers. With a combination of reliability and functionality, it spans virtual, physical and cloud environments, all from one platform. The vendor says their product is designed with flexibility, scalability and high security in mind, and uses an industry standard SQL database, supports relational database catalogs, and has heterogeneous client support including Linux, OS X and Windows, as well as backup to disk, tape, virtual tape, robotic libraries, public and private Cloud.
According to the vendor, Bacula Systems works to deliver extremely high standards of support. Customers receive direct access to senior support engineers.
Bacula Enterprise Integrations
Amazon API Gateway, VMware ESXi, SAP HANA, Google Cloud CDN, Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Microsoft Azure Active Directory, PostgreSQL, MySQL, DB2, Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) (formerly RHEV), Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer), Docker and persistent data, Kuberbetes Clusters, Oracle Cloud, MSSQL, SAP (Sybase) ASE, KVM, Active Directory / LDAP, Xen, Oracle DB, SWIFT Cloud Storage
Bacula Enterprise Competitors
Bacula Enterprise Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, Suse, OpenSuse |
| Mobile Application: | Android |
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Bacula Enterprise?
Bacula Enterprise is a data center backup, restore, and recovery solution from Swiss, Dracula-themed software company Bacula Systems.
What are Bacula Enterprise's top competitors?
Veeam Backup & Replication, Veritas Backup Exec, and IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager are common alternatives for Bacula Enterprise.
What is Bacula Enterprise's best feature?
Reviewers rate Backup to the cloud highest, with a score of 9.7.
Who uses Bacula Enterprise?
The most common users of Bacula Enterprise are from Enterprises and the Government Administration industry.