Arctera Backup Exec vs. Bacula Enterprise

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Arctera Backup Exec
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
Arctera Backup Exec is a backup and disaster recovery solution. It works in virtual, physical, and multi-cloud environments and integrates with several third-party software releases and applications.N/A
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Bacula Enterprise is a data center backup, restore, and recovery solution from Swiss, Dracula-themed software company Bacula Systems.N/A
Pricing
Arctera Backup ExecBacula Enterprise
Editions & Modules
Veritas Backup Exec
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Arctera Backup ExecBacula Enterprise
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Arctera Backup ExecBacula Enterprise
Features
Arctera Backup ExecBacula Enterprise
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Arctera Backup Exec
8.6
Ratings
1% above category average
Bacula Enterprise
9.4
Ratings
10% above category average
Universal recovery10.00 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Instant recovery7.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Recovery verification7.90 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Business application protection10.00 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations6.40 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Incremental backup identification7.90 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Backup to the cloud10.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Deduplication and file compression7.40 Ratings9.70 Ratings
Snapshots8.40 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Flexible deployment9.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Management dashboard9.00 Ratings9.70 Ratings
Platform support8.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Retention options8.40 Ratings9.80 Ratings
Encryption10.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
User Ratings
Arctera Backup ExecBacula Enterprise
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
1.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
1.0
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Availability
4.0
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
3.0
(0 ratings)
9.8
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Arctera Backup ExecBacula Enterprise
Likelihood to Recommend
One of the differentials is that of all the backup tools I used, Veritas Backup Exec has the best management and control interface. It is very easy to use and configure the rules. There are several options that we can optimize our work for our specific needs, from scheduling a backup, restoring data, directories, alerts system, error reports, backups, inconsistencies and other very interesting things. It has integration with SQL, vmware, hyper v. Backup and restore speeds are fast and secure.
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Well suited: - I use it for on premise and cloud backup and recovery and it is excellent for this job. - I also experiment with different hypervisors and till now Bacula seems to work with all of them - Security is really important for me as I had many bad experiences in the past and Bacula solution makes me totally confident. Less appropriate - You need to be experienced Linux user, I had to learn few more things in system to make the best use of it. - It's definitely designed for scalability and bigger companies than mine
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Pros
  • The license/agent deployment feature in Backup Exec facilitates effective and speedy population within your data center.
  • Veritas Backup Exec's feature rich job creation is intuitive and simplifies backup strategies.
  • Customizable views in the Administrator console allow you to view your backup environment to maximize visibility.
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  • The support services provided by Bacula Systems are superb. They usually respond extremely quickly and have clear and useful answers upfront, which is a welcome change. Their support enabled us to get Bacula Enterprise up and running quickly and well configured, in a relatively short period of time. In addition, they also offer proactive support on a yearly basis. This involves sending an automatically generated report on your system configuration and status from which they provide advice on any issues or configuration problems that they find. I haven't seen this level of proactive support from another company.
  • The configuration is extremely powerful and flexible. If you're used to dealing with text-based configuration files then you'll find this system familiar. It also fits well with configuration management tools - in our case, Puppet - allowing the configuration across the whole system to be managed centrally. The flexibility of the system allowed us to have backups running exactly when and how we wanted, performing staging to tape via disk, and with various admin, tasks to automate the handling of tapes within our tape library.
  • The command-line console tool allows all operations to be done from the command line. In an emergency situation, or stuck in a datacentre with only a dumb console, being able to do everything via the command line is an important feature to have.
  • Bweb is an optional extra that provides a web-based interface for both management and configuration. If you don't want to edit text files and use the command line console tool then Bweb is the best interface to use. We don't use it for configuration (favoring external tools for managing the text-based configuration), but we do use it to monitor backups and perform restores. It provides an excellent overview of what's happening with the system.
  • The manuals, whitepapers, and additional documentation cover everything in detail. The whitepapers give a good overview of the installation, concepts, and specific scenarios, whilst the manuals cover in more depth how specific areas work and how the configuration is handled. It's very easy to find out what a particular option means and does.
  • The software can run on and is supported on, a wide variety of operating systems, including Ubuntu which is what we use. This is a level of flexibility that was important to us after being tied to RHEL for our previous backup system.
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Cons
  • The user interface can sometimes be sluggish and hang between options.The minimum spec is 2Gb but if running on a dedicated server I think 4Gb is recommended
  • As more companies seem to be entering the backup software market, Acronis is very aggressive on pricing and even offer discounts if you are replacing other backup solutions, the Backup Exec pricing plans have become a more expensive
  • Our version is an older 2014 version and has inadequate support for VM backs
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  • Takes a while to get used to the software. It's not something that you can just install and work away with. You need to figure it out first. We did get a free training course when we purchased the Bacula Enterprise version which we found very useful.
  • Support Documentation is very in depth but it's a tough read sometimes. Takes a while to understand the concepts from this documentation. Could do with making the documentation a small bit easier to understand.
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Likelihood to Renew
This software is a mess in my brutally honest opinion. I've spent more time babysitting this software while backing up 20 servers than I did with Veeam backing up 600+. I've had multiple jobs run fine for weeks at a time that just randomly fail out of the blue for seemingly no reason whatsoever. There's no intuitive way to chain jobs, so automation becomes somewhat more problematic if certain jobs depend on other jobs. The forever incremental feature feels tacked on since the merge operation merges all your incremental jobs into the most recent backup and doesn't have the option set a limit on how long to keep your point in time restores.
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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.
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Usability
It can do a lot of things on paper and sounds terrific, but in practice it doesn't do any of them well. It can easily be sold to non-technical minds and C-levels, but of all the backup solutions I've used in the last 15 years of my career, Backup Exec is easily the least fault tolerant. Unless this software is a sunk cost and you're on a shoestring budget, I recommend almost anything else. Jobs fail often with obscure error codes and the KB articles in the Veritas support portal are a mess. Within 30 days of a fresh deployment I've logged more tickets with their support than I did in 3 years with Veeam.
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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.
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Reliability and Availability
The weekly error on save needs a manual reload from me. The SDR can't restore the virtual machine of hyperV during a test.
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Bacula Enterprise is always available when we need it, both the backup solution and system support
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Performance
No problem for this point it is in the average.
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Operation in the Bacula system has a light and fast interface and reports are generated almost instantly. Perhaps if Bacula is integrated with other solutions it may lose some performance
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Support Rating
In the few instances of having to contact support, our overall outcome was always good. They would have received a better score if the wait time was less, but I attribute this to the timing of support calls - it was during the previous owner's time. We have not had to open a support ticket since Veritas Backup Exec took the product back over.
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We have always been very well served by Bacula Enterprise support. The response time is excellent, and any doubts or problems are resolved quickly and easily, avoiding complications and the evolution of problems that could arise. Only praise for Bacula Enterprise's service and support. The monitoring of the entire process from acquisition to implementation was very well done.
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
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.
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Implementation Rating
It was pretty straightforward.
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Bacula Systems and especially Bacula Brazil were extremely attentive and served us very well, making all implementations or changes work perfectly
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Alternatives Considered
Veritas Backup Exec is very comparable to Unitrends and in some areas is easier to use. The license side of Veritas Backup Exec is much more difficult to manage compared to Unitrends. Unitrends seems to be a much smoother solutions to protect virtual environments. Restoring data with Veritas Backup Exec is logical and easier to achieve, Unitrends is a bit less logical or intuitive.
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The possibility of increasing the amount of data to be saved without having to pay more for the license was one of the things that led us to choose Bacula, but when effectively testing the tool, it became clear that in addition to the financial benefit, we would also have a backup reliable and robust.
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Scalability
We only use it on the on-premise version on a single site.
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Bacula provides intelligent scalability by expanding backups across multiple environments, data backup, Oracle, virtual machines, Office365, cloud...
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Return on Investment
  • As the person tasked with the job of protecting the company's data, I am glad that Backup Exec performs that job well. I am able to often set-it-and-forget-it and go about the rest of my duties. I have never had a situation where Backup Exec was called upon to restore data and it was unable to do so. This reflects well on both me and my department and provides a sense of security to the rest of the company.
  • I am not making full use of the product and have not licensed a number of its features, but even the base feature set is impressive. To be clear, Backup Exec is no longer the only product we reply upon for data protection, but it is still a large part of that program. If an SMB can find the budget to afford to license the set of features meet its particular demands, Backup Exec will do what you need.
  • As an industry leader, Backup Exec is well positioned to stay at the head of the pack (as they have done for many years) and provide their customers with a comprehensive set of capabilities that will always remain in the forefront of technology.
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  • What price can you put on recovery? The very first time we had to restore from backup, having Bacula Enterprise support paid for itself.
  • The extremely good visibility into Bacula Enterprise's operations--as opposed to some competitors where you don't really know what it's doing--makes me trust it more.
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ScreenShots