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R1Soft Versus Bacula
Posted on January 13th, 2010 3 comments
When implementing a backup system for a network of Windows servers I evaluated R1Soft and Bacula, and thought it might be nice to share some thoughts here on the amazing blog! 
So, the main differences. As of now R1Soft is $348 (up from $180 two weeks ago). Bacula is free and completely open source with an option of commercial support.
R1Soft has a very nice web interface for managing all the systems, and setup configuration is extremely easy.Also the Bacula server (storage and director) component is not supported on Windows. Only on Linux/UNIX systems. But it works as that’s what I’m running currently with Bacula 3.0.3a.
Bacula has many of the same features as R1Soft, but the fact that everything is configured through text configuration files can be a turn-off for some people as it is quite a learning curve. If you just want to get it done without a fuss, R1Soft is your choice. In my case I decided to save a few thousand dollars by learning Bacula and implementing it.
Also Bacula stores the backups in monster volume files while R1Soft uses a more file based structure which I do prefer. Although performance does seems to actually be better with Bacula during a backup.
Overall I decided to go to Bacula solely on price. If R1Soft was still at $180/agent I would have seriously considered going with them because of official Windows server support and awesome web gui interface. But free software won again, despite the initial challenge of learning a new configuration file specification.
I might have to teach a course now to make some ROI for learning the stuff.
3 responses to “R1Soft Versus Bacula”
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Something that should be pointed out is that there is a big difference in backup performance between Bacula and R1Soft CDP.
At R1Soft we believe the most important aspect of backup performance is the length of the backup window and not the transfer rate.
R1Soft CDP focuses on this and reduces backup windows down to just minutes even on large disks.
The result is that you can backup very frequently e.g. once per hour or once every 15 minutes and there is much less over-all load on your production server.
Bacula does a old style incremental or differential or full backup. This takes many hours to perform and is why we consider bacula “legacy” backup software.
Another thing to consider is bare-metal restore. True bare-metal restore requires a block-level image type backup.
You can learn more here: http://wiki.r1soft.com/display/TP/Backup+Software+Technology
Regards,
-David Wartell
R1Soft Founder -
Thanks for the reply David. And to be honest I had finished a trial of your product and was on your web site to purchase it, and then saw the price increase. I was totally prepared for the $180/agent but the new price threw me off and I began looking for alternatives. This client only wants weekly backups but even then, your product is superior in my opinion, but Bacula will get the job done.
Once again I do appreciate your response.
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And just one more note, when I was talking about performance, it was the performance of the server. R1Soft did use more CPU power than Bacula, but the difference was so minimal it’s not enough to make a business decision on. It’s always about bottom line.
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