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Bacula Enterprise

Bacula Enterprise

Overview

What is Bacula Enterprise?

Bacula Enterprise is a data center backup, restore, and recovery solution from Swiss, Dracula-themed software company Bacula Systems.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Bacula Enterprise is a versatile backup tool widely used by businesses to ensure the safety and accessibility of their data. Users praise …
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TSM Convert

10 out of 10
July 06, 2023
I've recently started using Bacula Enterprise after switching from IBM's TSM. I wanted to do a proof on concept before …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 14 features
  • Multiple backup destinations (44)
    10.0
    100%
  • Incremental backup identification (45)
    10.0
    100%
  • Platform support (46)
    10.0
    100%
  • Retention options (46)
    9.7
    97%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is Bacula Enterprise?

Bacula Enterprise is a data center backup, restore, and recovery solution from Swiss, Dracula-themed software company Bacula Systems.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Features

Data Center Backup

Data center backup tools send data to a secure storage location after encryption and de-duplication

9.3
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

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 Features

Data Center Backup Features

  • Supported: Instant recovery
  • Supported: Recovery verification
  • Supported: Multiple backup destinations
  • Supported: Incremental backup identification
  • Supported: Backup to the cloud
  • Supported: Deduplication and file compression
  • Supported: Snapshots
  • Supported: Flexible deployment
  • Supported: Management dashboard
  • Supported: Platform support
  • Supported: Retention options
  • Supported: Encryption

Bacula Enterprise Video

Bacula Enterprise Edition (www.baculasystems.com/products/bacula-enterprise) is the modern data backup, restore and disaster recovery solution that does not penalize you for data volume. Bacula Enterprise Edition is a subscription-based enterprise data backup solution which ...
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Bacula Enterprise Integrations

Bacula Enterprise Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, Suse, OpenSuse
Mobile ApplicationAndroid

Frequently Asked Questions

Bacula Enterprise is a data center backup, restore, and recovery solution from Swiss, Dracula-themed software company Bacula Systems.

Veeam Data Platform, Veritas Backup Exec, and Tivoli Business Service Manager (legacy) are common alternatives for Bacula Enterprise.

Reviewers rate Instant recovery and Recovery verification and Multiple backup destinations highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Bacula Enterprise are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(56)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Bacula Enterprise is a versatile backup tool widely used by businesses to ensure the safety and accessibility of their data. Users praise the software's flexibility, power, and adaptability to accommodate ongoing changes and evolving needs. For example, the BGW Group relies on Bacula Enterprise to perform daily backups of their company servers, which consist of a mix of physical and virtual machines running different operating systems. The software's comprehensive backup solution supports plugins for MySQL, Postgres, LDAP, Docker, and S3, making it an ideal choice for universities like the Rectory, where it performs daily backups of critical systems. Similarly, CloudHQ values Bacula Enterprise for its reliability in backup and restore operations across their mixed Windows/Linux environment. The Brazilian Naval Supply System Command depends on Bacula Enterprise for efficient backup and restore of their database, taking advantage of its advanced features and ability to handle high volumes of data. Additionally, individuals and organizations use Bacula Enterprise as a cost-effective and flexible solution for data backup and restore needs. Government facilities employ the software to protect meteorological and hydrographic data while ensuring fast restoration capabilities, serving as their last line of defense against encryption attacks. With its value-for-money proposition and simple management interface, Bacula Enterprise is trusted by many companies to centralize backup solutions for heterogeneous systems. It provides compatibility with different environments and expertly handles monitoring, encryption, secure cloud support, and multi-platform compatibility. Municipalities such as Campinas rely on Bacula Enterprise as their primary backup tool for structured and unstructured data across various applications and operating systems. In the case of McLean Imaging Center, Bacula Enterprise backs up servers, databases, virtualized environments, applications, and shared files – delivering an effective backup framework for disaster recovery purposes. Furthermore, users leverage Bacula Enterprise's extreme security measures and fast data recovery capabilities for tasks such as restoring lost files or performing bare metal recoveries. The software's efficiency, compression, and storage reduction capabilities have garnered high regard from the data recovery industry. Bacula Enterprise is used in different scenarios, including by technical teams managing big projects, organizations performing file-based backups, and government facilities aiming to make backups accessible. Its centralized management features, user-friendly graphical interface, and support for various operating systems are highly appreciated by users across industries. With a focus on agility and security, Bacula Enterprise is the go-to backup solution for organizations with virtualized environments, physical servers, files, and databases. It caters to a wide range of backup needs, such as daily backup maintenance, data recovery from servers and databases, and compliance with legal agreements. Bacula Enterprise offers centralized management through a graphical interface, allowing multi-user access and providing solutions to various backup problems. The software's simple and efficient interface automates backup tasks and supports different operating systems. It is frequently used for backup and restore of virtual machines, file servers, email accounts, ACLS, active directory, and databases like Oracle and PostgreSQL. Users appreciate the optimization of backup workflows, resulting in faster routines and enhanced data security. Whether it's a department within an organization or the entire corporate technological environment, Bacula Enterprise is chosen as the backup solution for extensive information systems. From backing up physical servers, virtual machines, files, and databases to managing backups across multiple data centers, Bacula Enterprise proves its value with cost-effectiveness, efficient compression, and storage reduction capabilities. Users have reported positive experiences with the software's quick response times and helpful support from the support team. With its ease of administration and good cost-benefit ratio compared to traditional solutions, Bacula Enterprise is considered an effective choice for businesses seeking reliable data protection across a diverse range of systems.

Efficient Backup Process: Many users have found the backup process of Bacula to be efficient, allowing them to specify file size for backups and easily locate and restore their data. This pro has been mentioned by several reviewers, highlighting its effectiveness in streamlining the backup process.

Complex and Flexible Scheduling System: The complex and efficient scheduling system of Bacula has received praise from a number of users. They appreciate the customization options and flexibility it offers, allowing them to tailor their backup schedules according to their specific needs.

Data Deduplication Feature: Users have commended the data deduplication feature of Bacula, which helps optimize storage by eliminating duplicate data. This valuable feature has been mentioned by multiple reviewers as it contributes to more efficient use of storage resources.

Outdated Backup Storage Format: Some users have found the backup storage format in Bacula Enterprise to be outdated, lacking deduplication support. They feel that this hampers the efficiency and effectiveness of their backups.

Inconsistent Support for Filesystem Snapshots on Non-Windows Platforms: Several reviewers have complained about the inconsistent support for filesystem snapshots on non-Windows platforms in Bacula Enterprise. This limitation poses challenges for users who rely on these platforms for their backup processes.

Interface Needs Improvement: Users have expressed frustration with the interface of Bacula Enterprise, both graphical and CLI, stating that it still needs improvement. They find it unintuitive and not user-friendly, which can slow down their workflow and make it difficult to navigate the software effectively.

Users recommend Bacula for its data security, low cost, and guaranteed updates and support. They suggest that Bacula may not be the easiest backup software to work with, but it offers the capability to perform complex tasks. To maximize its potential, users advise taking the time to familiarize oneself with Bacula. They also recommend testing and evaluating Bacula among other backup solutions before making a purchase. Users emphasize the steep learning curve of Bacula and recommend taking Bacula Enterprise training. Bacula is praised for being a cost-effective and robust backup solution. Users mention the availability of a repository with all necessary packages and helpful documentation for specific use cases. The helpfulness of Bacula's support team is also highlighted by users. Finally, users consider Bacula as the option for backup, especially for disaster recovery purposes.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-5 of 5)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
  • They could just improve a little the visual part of bweb, but in version 14.0.3 it is already very cool.
I believe that Bacula fits perfectly in small and large companies using Linux and Windows operating systems.
  • Fast restore
  • Agile backup management
  • Security of the institution's information
Data Center Backup (12)
100%
10.0
Instant recovery
100%
10.0
Recovery verification
100%
10.0
Multiple backup destinations
100%
10.0
Incremental backup identification
100%
10.0
Backup to the cloud
100%
10.0
Deduplication and file compression
100%
10.0
Snapshots
100%
10.0
Flexible deployment
100%
10.0
Management dashboard
100%
10.0
Platform support
100%
10.0
Retention options
100%
10.0
Encryption
100%
10.0
  • Extremely positive impact due to our information being important to the institution's activities.
Já usávamos o Bacula Community e decidimos contratar o Bacula Enterprise pois os backups já estavam em um padrão aberto sendo de fácil migração.Outros aspectos nos levaram a contratação:Suporte em caso de algum desastre;Possibilidade de contratação de plugins a aplicações como oracle, postgresql, cloud e interface web;
5
All who operate the backup system are employees of the information technology sector
1
The software is so easy to operate that we only have one expert to provide the support work.
  • Vmware virtual machine backups
  • Oracle and Postgresql Database Backup
  • Backup of linux operating systems
  • We implement backup of switches and routers
  • We made integration with zabbix to inform possible problems in backups
  • Cloud
We intend to renew but we have some momentary financial difficulties which can get in our way, despite the bacula being much cheaper than other backup solutions.
Yes
We updated bacula community to the enterprise version
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
Certainly the two most important factors were: Features along with the previously used backup format (Bacula Community); Price much less than other solutions.
I wouldn't change anything about the acquisition process.
  • Implemented in-house
  • Third-party professional services
We contracted the implementation together with Bacula Brazil, which provided us with all the necessary and fast support for the perfect functioning of the solution.
No
  • We had no implementation issues.
Bacula Systems and especially Bacula Brazil were extremely attentive and served us very well, making all implementations or changes work perfectly
Extremely fast support and all the people I contacted were super interested in clarifying or solving any kind of technical calls.
I bought support to have greater security in case a problem arises. The tool is very good and I only had to get in touch for cases where I wasn't sure to make some decisions in using the tool.
No
A little over 2 years ago I opened a ticket where the backups had problems when recording to a tape library. The analysts contacted me and we came to the conclusion that the equipment (hardware) was in trouble. How bad! We no longer had warranty on this equipment. The problem was not the software.
Extremely easy to use software.
  • Bweb
  • I couldn't find any features difficult to use.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The reason we use Bacula Enterprise is to provide an effective backup and disaster recovery framework. As the solution is agnostic, that is, it can be deployed in practically any system or application, we understand that Bacula Enterprise is currently the most appropriate solution for our environment. We use it to backup servers (Linux, MS-Windows Server, FreeBSD), database (Oracle, MySQL and MS-SQL), virtualized environments (Vmware), applications, in addition to shared file backups
  • Backup Duplication and Deduplication
  • Database backup like MySQL and Oracle
  • Backup and fast restore of mailboxes
  • Our team always points out the same problems, I believe that, today, is our biggest complaint: The interface (both graphical and the CLI) still needs improvement.
  • There is no mobile app to manage backups and restores from smartphones
  • Manual installation is time consuming.
As stated before, the system is agnostic, and its implementation can be carried out in any environment, as long as there is a team to implement and maintain it or a support contract suitable for the needs of your organization. Due to its wide compatibility, it can be used in mixed environments, such as prepared with disks and tape libraries, as well as in cloud environments.
  • High compatibility of environments for our scenario, thanks to its plugins
  • Low time and investment for deployment
  • Support trained, proactive and agile in your service.
  • Possibility of backups in multiple locations/volumes simultaneously
Data Center Backup (12)
100%
10.0
Instant recovery
100%
10.0
Recovery verification
100%
10.0
Multiple backup destinations
100%
10.0
Incremental backup identification
100%
10.0
Backup to the cloud
100%
10.0
Deduplication and file compression
100%
10.0
Snapshots
100%
10.0
Flexible deployment
100%
10.0
Management dashboard
100%
10.0
Platform support
100%
10.0
Retention options
100%
10.0
Encryption
100%
10.0
  • The fact of having the possibility of having multiple backup locations simultaneously, in addition to their encryption, guarantees that it is possible, in a feasible way, to perform a disaster recovery.
  • Due to deduplication, disk storage is optimized, making backups take up little space on storage volumes and, consequently, require a low investment in disks and storage.
  • Also regarding dedup, the tool implements it effectively, dramatically accelerating backup and restore speed, optimizing recovery time (RTO)
Both tools are of great quality, however the investment in Bacula Enterprise is much lower, due to not having to license each backup client. In addition, it is clear to be multi-environment, and can be used in different systems and scenarios through its plugins. These can even be acquired as your environment grows, adapting your planning and investment over time. And, last but not least, we have the incredible quality of Bacula Enterprise's support, which serves us very closely and quickly, answering all our doubts, regardless of time or day of the week.
17
We have our IT director; three coordinators from related areas and the others are analysts and technicians. The performance is segmented by ICT area that each one occupies, being the responsibility of the director and the coordinators to carry out strategic actions in relation to the implementations of disaster recovery and backup systems.
17
We have a team of analysts who belong to the ICT areas responsible for analyzing more complex calls involving the tool, then there is the technicians, also from the ICT area, who act as initial support in the calls and interns who work in recovery tests and built-in backup verification routines.
  • Implementation of backup and restore routines of mailboxes.
  • Restoring virtual machines from VMware environment
  • Discovering the real volume of backups we need
  • I believe that bare metal recovery of a totally lost virtual machine was the most unexpected case that we used it for.
  • We intend to integrate multiple storage clouds with Bacula Enterprise to perform encrypted copies simultaneously
We see no need to change backup systems for the next few years here in our organization. Bacula Enterprise fully serves us and its support service is excellent and agile. The hiring value is low and the tool is constantly evolving. Our team is completely satisfied with the solution implemented.
  • In-Person Training
The professor understood the tool very well, it was a fact that he had mastery over the system and knew what he was talking about, clearing up all doubts and passing on all the necessary knowledge so that we could handle Bacula Enterprise in our organization.
It's even weird to see some reviews out there punctuating Bacula Enterprise's support service poorly, I've never even had a problem that wasn't answered by the support team. Not to mention that they are available at any time, no matter what time or day you contact them, and they are extremely competent and knowledgeable about the tool.
We have the support service, but we don't use the term premium, our subscription package is the Bronze Perpetual Subscription, which we recently renewed by the way. Which, as I mentioned earlier, serves us excellently. Bacula Enterprise has other subscription levels of support, but this is more than enough for us and our environment.
No
When we needed to configure the backup and restore of our e-mail system the support was very helpful. There was also a situation where the disks of a virtual machine (Vmware) had been totally corrupted and not even Vmware support could solve the problem, Bacula Enterprise support not only managed to backup the machine but also restore it at the level of bare metal.
In general, using the system is simple, but it still has a graphical interface that is not so clear and easy to manipulate. It is not suitable for all browsers and is also not very responsive, not suitable for use on mobile devices. Other than that, performing a backup, restore, scheduling or test operation is relatively easy and fast, and can be performed, provided that they have training, by any technician.
  • Create a backup schedule (routine)
  • Perform automated restore tests
  • Generate usage reports and various aspects of backup and restore.
  • Install clients on multiple systems: lack of a more automated installation
  • Perform backup and restore tracking via a mobile device
Yes
It is the part that most needs improvement; Bacula enterprise does not have an interface really designed for mobile devices or even compatible with multiple browsers, I've found. At various times, using it on a cell phone, for example, ends up crashing your browser. And to top it off, it doesn't have a mobile app.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Bacula plays an important role to ensure our data recovery. Bacula also has so many flexibilities that we can configure according to our needs. We use Bacula Enterprise, Bacula vSphere Plugin, and Bacula Web. I would like to give a big shout to Bacula Support. Their reaction is great and is very helpful with troubleshooting the problems that I had. The explanation of troubleshooting is also clear and in a very detailed way.
  • Troubleshooting skills
  • Flexibility in configuring Job & Schedules
  • Bacula Support are top
  • Bacula Web could be improved in the future.
Flexibilities to configure the backup jobs, schedules are the most helpful feature in Bacula Enterprise. Bacula can almost cover everything.
  • vSphere plugin
  • Flexibility of configuring Jobs and Schedules
Data Center Backup (8)
85%
8.5
Instant recovery
90%
9.0
Recovery verification
90%
9.0
Multiple backup destinations
100%
10.0
Incremental backup identification
100%
10.0
Management dashboard
N/A
N/A
Platform support
100%
10.0
Retention options
100%
10.0
Encryption
100%
10.0
  • Very Important to have Backup and recovery procedure in ISO Audit
5
IT Administrators
4
IT Administrators
IT Engineers
IT Teamlead
  • Backup
  • Restore
  • Automatic Recycling
  • Offsite Backup
  • DMZ Backup
  • Automatic Recycling
Yes
Support Linux better that the others
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
We were using community edition before that. Then we realize we need more features like vsphere plugin and Bweb.
the easiness of backup administration
  • Implemented in-house
Yes
Setup and configure backup Servers and Tape Libraries, networking, etc.
Analysis,
Testing Phase,
Production
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
  • the network speed
Ensure the backup traffic goes through separate traffic as the other environment.
Absolute Top support!! Very detailed explanation and troubleshooting guide!
No, Standard Support was even great enough!
Yes
Yes, about vsphere plugin. It was resolved with the updated packages.
It was when I had to recover from failed backup director. Lessons learned at that time, that we need also to backup bacula director
easy enough to understand how it works. Beside, there are many helpful guides in the internet
  • bacula director
  • bacula file daemon
  • bacula storage
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
If all we needed to do was recover a file or server here and there without any time pressure, we'd be doing alright. I keep thinking about what would happen in a true disaster if something went awry with Bacula during the restore process. The time lag of trying to get in contact with someone overseas who probably won't get the message right away, and may or may not respond that day tends to keep me awake at night. I'm used to 24/7 high-priority support from companies like CommVault and EMC. OpenSource does have some advantages, but saving time isn't one of them.
  • One interface for all backups
  • Backup and DR reporting
  • Speed of backups
Data Center Backup (14)
25.714285714285715%
2.6
Universal recovery
N/A
N/A
Instant recovery
30%
3.0
Recovery verification
20%
2.0
Business application protection
30%
3.0
Multiple backup destinations
50%
5.0
Incremental backup identification
40%
4.0
Backup to the cloud
N/A
N/A
Deduplication and file compression
50%
5.0
Snapshots
80%
8.0
Flexible deployment
10%
1.0
Management dashboard
10%
1.0
Platform support
20%
2.0
Retention options
20%
2.0
Encryption
N/A
N/A
  • 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 with EMC Networker.
  • 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
Cost: Bacula wins hands down on cost.
Deduplication: CommVault is, as they put it, hardware-agnostic when it comes to deduplication, and is really fast. Bacula does deduplication too, but not nearly as well. CommVault's deduplication remains deduplicated across all media. Not so for Bacula.
Reliability: Having worked with CommVault for many years, I still have much more faith in its reliability and support. However, Bacula is doing a pretty good job of getting a lot of systems backed up regularly. EMC's NetWorker, on the other hand, NEVER had even one day of successful backups in over a three-year period.

In the end, our company selected Bacula because of the cost savings and the belief that it would be reliable enough to cover and recover at least 90 percent of our systems.
9
IT - Linux administrators
IT - Windows administrators
IT - Database administrators
We have one primary in-house support person, who has a less knowledgable secondary.
  • 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.
Management is keen on cost saving. I prefer the pervious backup solution we had, but support was getting expensive. I think Bacula has a lot of growing up to do before I would put it in the same category as the "big boys," but they are making progress. With the help of customers' feedback and tickets, they'll get there in the next year or two.
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.
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 is well suited for any long-term data persistence and retrieval applications. Within my organization, our persisted production data changes depending on the day, and Bacula allows us to schedule proper filesets to match how quickly they change. Additionally, the restoration and retrieval of those filesets is a snap -- with the Enterprise edition, the GUI has a quick drag/drop interface that allows you to choose which files need to be restored and where. This saves us time from muddling around in complicated configuration files or using the console.
Data Center Backup (11)
100%
10.0
Recovery verification
100%
10.0
Multiple backup destinations
100%
10.0
Incremental backup identification
100%
10.0
Backup to the cloud
100%
10.0
Deduplication and file compression
100%
10.0
Snapshots
100%
10.0
Flexible deployment
100%
10.0
Management dashboard
100%
10.0
Platform support
100%
10.0
Retention options
100%
10.0
Encryption
100%
10.0
  • 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.
Other backup products not listed here: AWS Backup, Rsync, Custom Scripts

The reason why I selected Bacula Enterprise is because of the high degree of configurability - other backup solutions rely on taking specific snapshots of all resources, however most of the data on our end hosts is not useful or can be regenerated easily. Bacula allows my organization to specifically backup resources based on severity and importance without making any sacrifices on volume of data or speed of retrieval.

Additionally, Bacula works great with a wide variety of backend storage types - you can use drives, tapes, and cloud to name a few - all of which are able to manage their own collections without duplication of data.
AWS Lambda, Code42 (formerly CrashPlan), Odoo, VMware ESXi, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elasticsearch
2
IT and Operations Admins have full capability to backup and restore files across the infrastructure. Our tool is used entirely as a disaster-recovery type tool without any end-use by our internal customers or developers.
2
We are a small organization and do not require heavy support. We perform quarterly disaster recovery scenarios and routinely retrieve files for end users based on need. Once in production, Bacula is simple to maintain and administer without heavy knowledge of the underlying configuration and deployment.

When things do go wrong the Bacula support team is effective and precise and the logs on the hosts themselves are verbose and descriptive.
  • 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.
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.
Yes
Technically the level of support we pay for comes with the level of the enterprise offering we pay for. At no point have I felt like I needed a higher level of support due to the proactivity of the support team and engineering staff at Bacula.
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.
I've used customer support with tons of enterprise software companies - I've never been so thoroughly impressed by a group's ability to over-communicate and over-deliver. Their support is always quick and they truly care about the outcome of your support ticket.
  • 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
It's a heavy lift to get everything up and running - authentication, encryption, file configurations, schedules, storage pools, etc. However once it is all configured it runs like a top - we haven't had any outages due to service configuration since our initial deployment of Bacula in our infrastructure in 2018.

I have full confidence in the implementation of the system - additionally we're able to create support bundles to send to Customer Support in the event any of the configuration is incorrect and/or hard to spot.
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