Bacula - A Backup Storage Solution That is Easy to Trust
May 13, 2019
Bacula - A Backup Storage Solution That is Easy to Trust
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Bacula Enterprise
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 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
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.
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.
Bacula Enterprise Feature Ratings
Using Bacula Enterprise
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.
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.
Bacula Enterprise Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
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.
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.
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.
Using Bacula Enterprise
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Convenient Feel confident using | Lots to learn |
- 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