Bacula Enterprise

Bacula Enterprise is highly customizable. It is easy (sometimes a tiny bit too easy, depends on how you like it) to tweak to your actual needs. No need to redesign your company's policies, you tune Bacula Enterprise to your company's policies. Bacula Enterprise uses an enterprise-grade and free database server for its catalogs (MySQL or PostgreSQL, you choose - the latter is better IMHO). This is a guarantee for solid performance and excellent scalability (virtually no limit in the catalog size, ability to run the database server on a separate system, and if you feel bold enough to play with advanced features such as database replication or clustering, you are free to do it). Bacula Enterprise comes with a very good service package: excellent training (in small groups, flexible content that can easily be adapted to your specific needs by skilled instructors, brilliant documentation (miles away from the free version online doc), good support (by engineers having a good technical knowledge of the product, not by employees reading a simple how-to documentation, I do appreciate), and several technical goodies that make your life easier (for example to integrate Bacula to your server's OS ecosystem). Bacula Enterprise is also featuring rather competitive pricing, especially compared to other major players on the market, and low prices are not coming with cuts in the product features or quality of its service, from what I could experience at least. Cherry on the cake, all people I had contact with at Bacula Systems is very kind and helpful, a real pleasure to get in touch with! Maybe due to the fact Bacula Systems is not a very large company, but it is a real pleasure to have real people at the other end of the line, with the feeling they like what they do!

After the setup it is very easy to scale the system and the repository could be setup on a reasonable database, i.e. PostgreSQL. The support of the product is world-class, the guys of Bacula Enterprise are working fantastic.

1) Excellent support service and personal communication. 2) Very good price. 3) Excellent performance.

It's not really a weakness for me, but it could be for some. Bacula Enterprise is a kind of product for nerds. I am a nerd, it suits me well. But you need to get your hands a bit dirty to use the product. For example, on a Linux server, knowing your Unix commands and having solid system administration knowledge is NOT an option. Bacula Enterprise is obviously built bottom-up. As such, the core system looks pretty solid, the user interface is less polished, and the GUI... is mostly lacking (well, there is one, but I'm definitely not a fan of it, it lacks too many advanced features IMHO). It does not make the product unusable, far from it, but it has been designed by engineers, not by marketing! Bacula Enterprise being highly customizable, it also means that if you could make mistakes in the customization, and get into trouble or miss some useful information (for example, missing some error reporting because you messed up the messaging system configuration). Unlike other products, Bacula Enterprise does not take your hand and guide you throughout the entire product configuration - you are free to do what you want, including doing bad things. However, if you are in a trouble, do not forget that there is a support team ready to help you out!

The setup could be a bit easier but this is whining at a very high level.

1) Very simple user experience. 2) Need a better reporting. 3) It's a little difficult to manage.