Believe it or not, there actually are backup solutions other than Bacula out there! This page is intended to help give you an idea of how Bacula stacks up against these other packages.
Feel free to add features or other backup solution you're familiar with. If an entry is blank, that means the answer wasn't known, so please go ahead and fill it in if you know. This page is intended to be an honest comparison, not just Bacula advertisement, so don't worry about including areas where Bacula comes up short. If nothing else, it will help with coming up with new ideas for the feature request list!
| Bacula | Amanda | Tivoli (TSM) | Veritas | Legato Networker | BrightStor ARCserve | Arkeia Network Backup | BakBone NetVault | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backup Levels | Full, Differential, Incremental,Consolidation | Full, Incremental(1-9)1 | Full2, Incremental | Full, Differential, Incremental | Full, Differential, Incremental, Consolidation | Full3, Differential, Incremental | Full, Differential, Incremental | Full, Differential, Incremental |
| Data Format | Custom, fully open | open, recoverable without Amanda | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | ||
| Autochangers | Fully supported | Fully supported | Fully supported | optional | Fully supported | Fully supported | Fully supported | |
| NDMP | No | Yes11 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Backup to Tape | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Backup to Disk | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | optional | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Backup to DVD | Yes | Yes | No | No | ||||
| Staging | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| SQL Catalog | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | ||
| Can handle 1 billion objects | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||
| OpenSource | Yes | Yes14 | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Commercial Support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| GUI | Yes - bat | Yes - ZMC11 | Client&admin client | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multi Platform | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Virus Scanning | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | |||
| Tripwire like functions | Yes | |||||||
| Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Backup span multiple volumes | Yes | Yes13 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Microsoft Exchange Support | Yes | Yes | Yes15 | Yes7 | Yes7 | Yes4 | Yes 9 | |
| Backup Reports | Yes (Via breport) | Yes | Yes | Yes5 | Yes | Yes | ||
| Backup Alerts (notify) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Incremental handles deleted files | Yes | Yes | Yes, with full incremental6 | |||||
| Encryption Datastream | Yes (TLS) | Yes | ||||||
| MSSQL-Support | No8 | Yes11 | Yes15 | Yes7 | Yes7 | Agent | ||
| Oracle-Support | No8 | Yes11 | Yes15 | Yes7 | Yes7 | Agent | ||
| Security Certified12 | Yes |
1 Incremental level 1 is the same as differential.
2 Full level is only at the verfy first backup, the rest are only Incremental backups.
TSM manages the data other than usual backup programs.
3 Full, “Keep Archive Bit” or “Clear Archive Bit”
4 Database and Brick Level.
5 Pre-created reports as well as a 'report writer' for custom reports.
6 TSM has multiple ways of doing an incremental backup. In an “incremental by date” (which is about the way Bacula does incrementals: backup everything that's modified since the last backup), no information about deleted files is stored. In an “full incremental”, the file system is compared with the last backup and file deletions are also saved. See http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/hfs/backup/index.xml.ID=body.1_div.2 and also http://www.unix.ualberta.ca/TSM/tsmunix/ans50008.htm#HDRPITREST
7 These features are supported with additionally purchased licenses.
8 Bacula community provides scripts to support database online backup. No build-in support!
9 Apparently there is an Exchange intagration, no on-hand experience here… http://www.arkeia.com/pr/pr_20030930_de.php
11 Currently available in Amanda Enterprise Edition, not OpenSource - http://www.zmanda.com.
12 Scanning of open source projects by Coverity under contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security - http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/608/569
13 Can span tapes, but it waste space http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Splitting_dumps_across_tapes
14 New Zmanda tools like ZMC gui aren't opensource
15 Tivoli Data Protection for …, need to purchase aditional licenses