Item: Bacula Enterprise
Rating: 9
Author: Luís Henrique Gonçalves de Aguiar

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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

Return on Investment

Bacula Enterprise shows a positive return on investment. When it comes to backup, it is difficult to calculate.
The institution I work for is a public university, where information security has incalculable benefits.

Support Rating

The contract support in Brazil does a good job, solving the problems and doubts presented with agility and efficiency. We had a little difficulty due to the language supported by the Bacula matrix, but not any major problems.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer), Zabbix

Likelihood to Recommend

I think that Bacula Enterprise is suitable in several scenarios, as it allows configuring your backup system in an intuitive way using BWEB, despite having a relatively high learning curve, in addition to plugins that make it possible to improve backup and restore specific applications. My usage experience is at a medium-sized university, in which we are currently working within a virtualized environment and we are migrating our environment to the cloud.

The Bacula Enterprise backup solution may not be suitable for very small environments with few applications, perhaps an alternative is the community version.

Bacula Enterprise Review

Overall Satisfaction with Bacula Enterprise