Bacula Enterprise - Reliable backup & recovery for your enterprise
October 17, 2019

Bacula Enterprise - Reliable backup & recovery for your enterprise

Paul D Simpson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bacula Enterprise

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.
  • 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.
  • Reduced backup licensing & support costs by ~60%
  • Enabled us to script criteria to include or exclude systems from backup jobs automatically. Time Saver!
  • Amazing! Absolutely Amazing support experiences!
Bacula Enterprise can do everything that we have needed to do with competing products. It may require a script be written, but there is a massive set of resources available online, and a wealth of experience in the support team that can guide us if needed.
We selected Bacula Enterprise because it can do everything the entrenched competitors can do, for a much lower cost, with superior support and flexibility.
I have never, in over 20 years in information technology, encountered a more responsive, competent, and helpful support team.
Examples:
  • Average time from ticket creation to initial acknowledgement (ticket assigned to an engineer): <15 minutes
  • Correct answers the 1st time, every time
  • New Feature Request was accepted, written, and implemented in less than 30 days

Do you think Bacula Enterprise delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Bacula Enterprise's feature set?

Yes

Did Bacula Enterprise live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Bacula Enterprise go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Bacula Enterprise again?

Yes

Bacula Enterprise is well suited to a variety of backup tasks... There are available plugins to accomplish pretty much anything we need to, and the cost for those plugins is very reasonable.
Recommended for (but certainly not limited to):
  • VM backups (VMware, Hyper-V, containers)
  • NDMP backups
  • Physical server backups via agent
  • CDP (Continuous Data Protection)
  • SAN backup transport
  • Encrypted backups

Bacula Enterprise Feature Ratings

Recovery verification
10
Multiple backup destinations
10
Incremental backup identification
10
Backup to the cloud
10
Deduplication and file compression
8
Snapshots
Not Rated
Flexible deployment
10
Management dashboard
7
Platform support
10
Retention options
10
Encryption
10

Bacula Enterprise Support

ProsCons
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
With my incumbent vendor, we used VMware Tags to select systems for backup. Bacula Enterprise did not have this functionality. I submitted a feature request, it was acknowledged almost immediately, I was advised that it would be implemented in less than 3 days, and I was offered the opportunity to beta test it less than a month later. The Bacula team knows what they are doing, and are very agile and responsive!