Barracuda Backup – a home run solution or a one-way ticket to a waste of money?
December 16, 2015
Barracuda Backup – a home run solution or a one-way ticket to a waste of money?
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Barracuda Backup
Barracuda Backup was being used internally within our company to back up our own in-house multiserver platform both physical and virtual. It worked fairly well for our purposes. At the time it made the most sense when taking into consideration the cost of each gigabyte of storage both locally on the appliance and in the Barracuda Cloud. Due to massive amounts of hard drive failure in the field among two dozen of our client sites, we moved away from the platform in search of a solution that all of our unhappy clients could switch to. As you jumped up the model ladder, the cost of owning and renewing the support services annually became incredibly top-heavy. Barracuda support always seemed to downplay the hard drive failures, even from a management standpoint. They always blame the excessive amount of vigorous disk usage. Being in the system integrator market for over 20 years I can confidently say BS. We have been a part of many customer site projects that have data arrays sustaining 50 MB to 250 MB and beyond (per second) running nonstop day and night 365 days a year without a remote resemblance of the hard drive failure rate Barracuda Backup appliances have.
- Barracuda Support seems to have an above average industry initial response time after you submit a problem to them.
- Barracuda Support personnel are always friendly and attentive.
- It is usually possible to reach a live tech support rep within 5 to 10 minutes of your initial phone call.
- The pricing structure (especially on higher models) gets ridiculous pretty quick.
- Annual service renewals for Energize updates and Instant Replacement are a bit top-heavy.
- Support personnel (including management) should not downplay hardware failures especially when laid out by a loyal reseller partner.
- The excessive amounts of mysterious hard drive failures within the appliances after a year of service or so eventually damaged customer client relationships. Barracuda made a few exceptions but we should not have had to get into those conversations every time another unit failed.
- When working with out failures, these appliances provided a great solution with good automation.
- Again, pricing becomes a bit ridiculous and top-heavy for both the unit itself and the annual service renewals the higher you go on the model scale.
We originally chose Barracuda Backup because it provided a solution far better than tape backup and removed the human element from off-site data storage. To this day price per gigabyte makes the most sense when choosing Barracuda Backup over others. The only thing that ruins the bottom line is our repetitive experience of customer unit drive failures and constant arguing with Barracuda support. This ultimately led to the almost virtual destruction of active Barracuda Backup appliances in our customer portfolio. The potential was there for a much better product if these failures weren't so predictable.