Testimonials
Below, you will find excerpts from email that users have sent us. The purpose is to give you some idea of what kinds of sites are running Bacula and how they are using it. These testimonials are used with permission of the author.

Norm Dressler - 2004/06/15

Bacula has been awesome for us. We used to use Ar**** but I have always hated the interface. And the cost was outrageous. Then I found bacula and wow! Everything in Ar**** and then some! The console is easy to use, easy to understand once you get the hang of it, and I usually don't have any problems restoring files! :)
I have 15+ machines I backup with Bacula with an autoloader, and I'm extremely happy with the product. Whenever someone asks me about what to use, I point them at Bacula.

Norm Dressler, Senior Network Architect

Michael Scherer - 2005/02/09

Our former backup-system was ARGHserve running on NT4. Due to the fact that we replaced most of our servers with Linux machines we had to find some other solution.
At first we tried ARGHserve on Linux, without much comfort. Database updates took days to complete, the database itself grew enormously large, ... not really something you except from such an expensive piece of software.
I began the quest for a new backup-solution, testing almost anything I could find on Sourceforge and Freshmeat and finally decided to go with Bacula.
It's perfectly maintained by Kern and many others, is an (very) active project with good support through maillists and an irc-channel, which can be found on Freenode.

Today we run Bacula on a SuSE based x86 machine with a 2.6 kernel, some RAID5-Systems and IBM Ultrium Tapelibrary. Without any issues and without more work than changing two tapes in the morning.

Recoveries aren't complicated as well, you either choose a jobid to restore from or let Bacula find the correct jobid for a file or directory you need to recover. You mark everything you need, Bacula tells you which tapes it needs, done.
You don't even have to wait for any daemon to finish database updates for backuped files, you can start with the recovery right after the backup-job is done. Perfect.

Michael Scherer, some admin

Ludovicz Strappazon - 2005/03/05

I had previously used Veritas Netbackup, but it was really too expensive for our University. Bacula permitted us to buy a library. Now, we use Bacula since 10/2002 with an ADIC Scalar 24 library and LTO ultrium, without any problems. I think it can do anything Netbackup could do with our configuration. We backup seven Linux servers, one NT server, four Windows 2003 servers and a few XP workstations. Some of these servers are backed up across a firewall using ssh; some others are on a private network. We tried succesfully the disaster recovery procedure on Linux and had some good results in restoring Windows "from bare metal". What do I like in Bacula ? It is very flexible and reliable. With its light interface console, I can manage the backups from everywhere. A few words about the support : it is free but efficient. I don't have to cross a level 1, level 2 helpdesk to have some help, I never felt alone, and the bacula-users mailing list is a mix of courtesy and honest speech. At last, you don't need to be a big company to have your features requests heard.
Thanks to Kern Sibbald and the others who give so much work and time for this project.

Ludovic Strappazon
University Marc Bloch de Strasbourg.

Jeff Richards - 2006/08/26

I used Bacula at my previous employer to backup: Linux, OpenBSD, Windows 2000,XP,2003, and AIX 5.1

Bacula provided a solution when I had no budget for backup software. The Linux systems (about 30) acted as Tivoli (TMF) gateways. The Linux systems were commodity PCs, so when the IDE HDs failed it took hours (usually at least 4) to clean up the Tivoli environment and rebuild the failed gateway. Using Bacula and mkCDrec I cut that time down to under an hour, and most of that time was not spent doing anything except waiting for the restore to finish. I recovered 2 failed Linux systems with Bacula.
I would like to thank you and the entire Bacula team for an excellent piece of software.

Jeff Richards
Consultant