R1Soft Versus Bacula

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.