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Bacula Enterprise is a data center backup, restore, and recovery solution from Swiss, Dracula-themed software company Bacula Systems.https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/9X/PB/KG4B76TUZIQ8.PNGBacula SystemsIndepth backup recovery product which has matured nicely2019-08-06T22:22:40.856ZWe 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.,9,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.,Nagios, Monitis, PaperCutBrian O'ConnellBacula Enterprise has my back2019-05-07T20:11:28.612ZOur 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.,10,I can't put a number on this but will say that the cost of Bacula Enterprise is fair and reasonable.,CTERA Enterprise File Sync & Share and Acronis Backup,NagiosCliff NieuwenhuisBacula Enterprise Review2019-06-06T23:11:22.096ZBacula 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).,10,Bacula Enterprise has allowed us to have more reliable backups at a lower cost than some other solutions we had explored.,Veritas NetBackupNick BeboutBacula does the job well2019-06-20T17:35:29.741ZWe 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.,10,Very positive impact on our ROI. Very well priced for the functionalities that Bacula provides as a backup and restore utility.,Veeam Backup & ReplicationAmit SontakeyBacula - A Backup Storage Solution That is Easy to Trust2019-05-13T21:40:54.027ZMy 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,9,Bacula provides my company with the confidence that no data is ever truly lost - the recovery options available to us are highly reliable and straightforward
Simplifying our backup and restore methodology with Bacula has saved our organization a tremendous amount of money over other software stacks and deployment models.,CloudBerry Backup and Veeam Backup & Replication,AWS Lambda, Code42 (formerly CrashPlan), Odoo, VMware ESXi, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elasticsearch,2,2,Deduplicated file storage
Simple backup and Restoration
Easy-to-use interface,We use Bacula to run custom scripts to provide dumps of configurations for the services that don't have Bacula plugins specifically, allowing for the backup of irregular interfaces without issues.,Our organization is continually changing what data is important and over what period of time - as we continue to use Bacula the tuning of our filesets and schedules allows us to quickly make changes that we can trust.,10,Yes,No,The organization uses LDAP for directory services within the infrastructure. However the interface Bacula Web Console uses to connect to LDAP is a little shaky (users must be in the Bacula database before they can authenticate with LDAP). This isn't a deal breaker by any means as we don't have a large userbase for the product.
The exceptional support was provided by Bacula when the question I asked support was thoroughly answered. Not only did the engineer confirm with development that what I experienced was the expected behavior, I was provided with a script to interface with the database automatically without having to do configuration myself - now whenever a user is added that should have Bacula web console access - a script fires off and adds them to the database before they try and log in.,10,Using the Bweb console is very easy to check on job status or configuration
Restoration using Bweb is very straightforward and provides a useful and configurable gui to work from
Fileset defintion is straightforward once you understand the parlance,Initial configuration requires a heavy lift - many different resources to maintain at once
Configuration must be managed individually on each host - the director does not centrally define all job configurations
Steep learning curve to understand the terminology enough to effectively communicate,No,7Verified UserArmazem Paraiba Protects Itself with Bacula Systems2017-08-04T21:16:16.013ZI 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).,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.,9,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.,MikroTik Routers and Switches, VMware ESXi, Puppet Data Center AutomationRubens UrquisaBacula - An OpenSource Backup Solution That's Growing Up2016-02-23T22:00:11.507ZBacula 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.,4,The obvious answer to this question is that it has saved our company a substantial amount of money. We do have a support contract with Bacula, and had to go back and forth with them and our legal department to clear up which county's laws would rule in a dispute, but we finally got that hashed out. It isn't free, but it isn't close to what we were spending for support previously.
The downside to the reduced cost of ownership is that it comes with reduced timeliness of support. If something breaks on a Saturday at 2:00 a.m., we aren't going to get support on it until sometime Monday, and even then the problem likely won't be fixed on Monday either.,CommVault,VMware ESXi, Hyper-V,,,Full system recovery - Windows, Linux - Physical servers, VMware servers and Hyper-V servers
Disaster Recovery - yet to be tested, but will be this year.
Meeting the SLAs for backups. ALL backups must be completed within the SLA windows.,All backups are sent to a ZFS, and critical systems are replicated from there to an offsite DR location.,Hopefully we will obtain the Hyper-V plugin this year to make recoveries of those systems easier to perform.
Hot-site disaster recovery. I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing we can shut a server or number of servers in our production environment and go live from our DR hot site within minutes.,6,Restarting a failed job is as simple as clicking on a re-run job icon.,Searching for a particular backup job requires the patience of Job because you have to weed through thousands of jobs that appear in the order in which they were run. Try searching for last BMR backup of "server_abc" when there are 800+ servers that are backed up every day, most starting with "vmware-xxxxxx" and you can't filter out all those that you don't want to see.
BMR works for recovering a Hyper-V server, but it is a kluge. Recovery should be built into the application rather than requiring an administrator to first build a bare bones server, boot from a customized BRM PE disk, reconfigure from there and the run the recovery.,4Verified User
Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, Suse, OpenSuse
Bacula Enterprise
11 Ratings
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