Barracuda Intronis Backup Reviews

We are an MSP Company and a Barracuda Partner/Re-seller. When our clients need a Backup Solution one of the products that can avail from is created based on Barracuda's Backup Services.

Our involvement in the process ranges from the initial assessment of the client's environment to determine the sizing requirements, to purchasing the hardware from Barracuda, deploying and configuring the hardware as well as the Cloud Control/Echo Platform accounts.

Once the appliances have been deployed and the initial configuration has been done, the appliances are added to our Monitoring Systems and our Service Delivery team manages and operate them.

Barracuda has a 5-year lifecycle for their hardware. Once the appliances go over that threshold, we engage Barracuda to replace the unit and migrate the data and configuration.

Our organization has developed a product based on Barracuda Backup. We leverage Barracuda's scale-management features that allow us to offer the solution through an "as a Service" model.

In addition to the physical appliance, Barracuda offers an all-in-one solution with the Off-Site Replication to their own cloud, which simplifies the deployment and management process, consolidates the recurring costs into a single bill, which makes it easier for us to present the added value of the solution to our clients.

First and foremost, the ease of management/operation. The cloud management portal is intuitive and fairly simple to navigate through and so is the Local UI.

Barracuda Campus is also a valuable feature, since you can have your staff properly trained to deploy and operate the solution without having to pay hefty fees to certified trainers.

Their technical support is also a significant value add. Barracuda will assist you with any requests/questions you might have. Interactions with their support often turn into learning experiences for the team and their technicians will see your request through completion regardless of your familiarity with the solution.

Barracuda Backup would benefit greatly from adding Changed Block Tracking Support for Hyper-V. There are certain challenges with the size of the data being backed up as well with some restore processes (namely, Bare-Metal Restore) that would be greatly affected by the implementation of support o CBT for Hyper V Environments.

The backup solution is fully integrated into Barracuda Cloud Control, I believe that adding orchestration capabilities to Restore/Disaster Recovery would take the product to a new level.

Over 3 and a half years.

Barracuda BBS are very reliable units. I don't recall dealing with RMAs because of malfunctioning parts of having Software/OS failures that caused service disruption.

Scalability with Barracuda Backup means upgrading the hardware. You might be able to assess what your storage needs will be in the future, but that could potentially mean unused resources and an unnecessarily larger bill.

The backups are stored locally on the appliance's disks and Barracuda recommendations are that the disk size on the appliance should be equivalent to twice the size of the raw data you need to protect. If the raw data grows and you need more local storage, you have to upgrade the hardware and migrate configuration and binary files over to the new device.

Barracuda Support, for any of their products, is always a plus. You call in, give them your serial number and, usually, within minutes you're speaking with someone that is knowledgeable about the product and can assist with completing your request/troubleshooting your issue.

Escalation within their Support Team is a bit of an issue. Their most senior techs are not necessarily customer facing and you get all your updates from the techs that you initially engaged with. If there is a back and forth to gather information and validate changes, this process becomes a little to cumbersome.

Overall I have had great experiences with their Customer Service and Support.

Positive

Initial setup is very easy and straight forward.

You get the new hardware, ship it to destination, configure IP Settings to it has access to internet and then link the appliance to Cloud Control for remote management/operation.

Adding the data sources is also very simple so getting a brand new unit up and running if often quick and uncomplicated. 

We have Field Services technician that are dispatched to the client locations to deploy and rack the appliances.

Our Platform Delivery team works on linking the account to our Cloud Control instance and configuring the Backup Jobs.

Our ROI is essentially the margins we add to the the recurring bills, since we sell a product based on Barracuda Backups.

Because it is a single package that includes everything, they are worth the money that you need to pay for it. You are paying for the hardware, licensing, the software that runs on it, regular updates, the cloud features included with it along with the replication, and your space allocated in the cloud for replication. It is fairly priced for what you get. 

Most of our clients are nonprofits and small businesses who can afford Barracuda. Because they sell it as a product, there is an added profit on top of the prices that are forwarded down to them, not on the licensee, but for deploying the hardware and all of that stuff. They are fairly well-priced.

I have done the Barracuda Essentials training on the delivery side and the technical side. I am involved in the setup of it. I have worked on a couple of installs for customers, and I am using the latest version of this solution.

The cloud side of it is nice. Everything happens behind the scenes without you realizing it, which is nice. It doesn't interrupt usage. There is also the freedom and ease of use of the cloud portal, which you can use to manage your backup. One of the strong points of Barracuda is that you can go from zero to having your first backup running within 10 minutes. If you have access to admin accounts and everything else, it can happen in 10 minutes.

The ability to go in and just restore a particular file without having to do a full restore is also very useful. You can just go in and pick the files that you need to restore, and the same is with email. You can just go in, find an email, and restore that email without having to do a full backup of all the data or a full restore of the data.

I feel very safe because it is not just about the backup; it is about the protection of the data from outside threats. They have a lot of areas of ATP, that is, advanced threat protection. You don't see that much on the backup side. You see it more on the email side. In the email protection, you know it is there at the back. It moves the quarantine emails that come through into a sandbox area, and then you can choose in the sandbox. You can open up an email in the sandbox to make sure that if there is a virus, it can't harm you. You can also plan how often your backups run, such as every six hours or four hours. It is the same with email.

They also have a great PhishLine package, which is phishing attack training. You can have the strongest and the best backup and security that you can, but the end user is always the weakest link. They send almost like testing emails to end users to help them identify and understand phishing emails and prevent user or phishing attacks. It is a very good package. 

I am working in some of the more rural areas of Sweden, and some of the customers here are a little bit wary of cloud technology at the moment. It is not like in Gothenburg or Stockholm, where people rely on it so much more. In the rural areas, companies are saying that we do need to use the cloud, and they are being very wary about their data, especially with GDPR and all that kind of stuff. Having more control and having an option for backing up locally, even if you don't want to use it, would be something very good.

The cloud backup is brilliant, but there should be an option to take that cloud backup and save it locally as well. If you lose connection to the internet or you lose access to your data in the cloud, having a backup copy of the latest data on your server is helpful. You need to be able to get access to your customers' files, especially with GDPR, where you need to know where your customers' details are. If they're in the cloud and you've lost access to them, then you'll go into those GDPR regulations. This is somewhere where both Barracuda and Veeam haven't gone as far. As far as I have understood, with Veeam, you can back up your local servers to the cloud but not vice versa. I haven't worked on it much.

I have been working with this solution for about six months.

It is stable. They provide great support. They have ways to back up your local servers to the cloud, etc. If any of their hardware has a failure, they send a new one within 24 hours to make sure that you don't have a backup loss. You will have a new one within 24 hours.

A strong point of Barracuda is that it auto-scales. You don't need to worry about scaling. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It takes 10 minutes. One of the strong points of Barracuda is that you can go from zero to having your first backup running within 10 minutes. If you have access to admin accounts and everything else, it can happen in 10 minutes.

All the storage is included in Barracuda, so you're just paying for the package. I think with Veeam, you pay for the package, and you pay for the storage.

When I was looking at Veeam, it had its own strengths. How they back up data is different, but they also have a very strong package.

I work with end users a lot, and I think that any solution that is easiest for the end users to use is a winner, and Barracuda fulfills that. If a solution gets too technical, then people might get confused.

I would rate Barracuda Backup a nine out of ten. 

We have two appliances at different locations. One is the primary and all the backups are going to that appliance. They're being replicated onto the secondary appliance and deduplicated. The appliances are on-premises, but the interface to control things goes through the cloud.

We are a public school division with about 5,000 staff and 30,000 students. We are backing up all kinds of applications, mostly data from servers. We are not backing up individual machines or any of the personal drives, but we are backing up all the shared drives that are used by the departments in the schools.

We have been able to migrate from tapes to Barracuda Backup, and that has helped us tremendously. Before, we had to manually take out the tapes and physically transport them to a different location for disaster recovery purposes. Barracuda has definitely saved us a lot of time.

If we need to restore something, it is much easier to find the data, rather than having to rummage through tapes and find the backups.

And the time-to-value with Barracuda was almost instantaneous.

It's a one-stop shop, meaning we just program and schedule the backups, decide what is being backed up, and then it automatically replicates and deduplicates.

We're working with them on our file share backups. Our solution needs a little bit more fine-tuning. We're not sure if the issue is at our end or at Barracuda's end.

I have been using Barracuda Backup for about five years.

It's pretty stable at this point.

We have been given options if we want to scale up. They have solutions in place if needed.

We don't have plans to increase our usage at this point, just because we're pretty stable where we are in terms of what data is being backed up. Some of our information is going to the cloud as well.

Their customer service and tech support are absolutely fantastic.

Positive

We used Arcserve for tape backups. The switch to Barracuda happened prior to my inheriting this project, but I believe the Arcserve solution that we had was reaching end-of-life. We needed to look at a different solution.

The initial deployment was very straightforward. We had a Barracuda tech on site who helped us install and configure the appliances. After that, everything was very straightforward.

We had two people involved in the deployment on our end. I was the rookie. We had to identify the data that needed to be backed up. We started with testing and time-trials to see how long it would take to back up. We then created the schedules and slowly onboarded all the backups from tape to Barracuda. Since then, it has been a matter of monitoring and maintaining.

The maintenance involves period updates to the firmware and, every now and then, when we have failures in our backups, we need to either manually update the agents or find out what's happening. That's when we call Barracuda. Their techs are absolutely fantastic in helping us with issues that we cannot control from the front end. They have to go in and manipulate things at their end.

Our ROI is that the time we used to spend with the tape backups is being used on other projects, and we haven't had to pay for the tapes, going forward. It saves us about 10 hours per week.

They're on par with their competitors. I haven't priced things out lately because we've had a five-year contract with Barracuda, renewing what we had before. We haven't looked at making changes yet.

My advice would be to include the amount of growth expected when you calculate the amount of space you'll need, if you want to maintain the solution for a long time.

The biggest lesson from using this solution is that it's like the tides, with ebb and flow. Sometimes the data balloons and we reach a threshold and, eventually, it purges and goes back down to a decent level. Also, make sure you use the retention policies properly so that the data gets purged. That's one of the things that we learned the hard way. We set up a whole bunch of servers and we forgot to add them to our retention schedule. The next thing you know, we were out of space and we were trying to figure out why.

At this point, we're happy with the product.

We have this solution set up on two pieces of equipment. The first is our main backup solution and the other one is a replication solution.

This is an on-premises deployment, with the physical equipment here in our LAN.

The most valuable feature is the Live Boot solution. It's a feature on the Barracuda that is very helpful for critical service. Whenever you have a crash or your service is not working, you can just live-boot the machine and have your service up and running.

The granularity of the backup is also very good. If you need to restore a single file from the backup, you don't need to retrieve the whole server or the whole folder.

It would be a big improvement if the Live Boot feature could work without the need for a secondary, standby server.

I would like to see the Live Boot feature extended to Hyper-V machines, in addition to VMware machines.

I have been using this solution for three months.

We have not had any issues in the three months that we have been running this solution, although I think that is too short a time to judge overall stability.

I think that the scalability of this solution is good because I started with AT&T V790 equipment, and I think that if I wanted to upgrade the storage space then it would not be difficult.

We have three people who use this solution. I am the manager, we have an HR person who is able to see whether their backup has been done or not, and we have the person responsible for the checking the backup when I am not in the office.

I haven't any opportunity myself to contact support. That's for the team that did the setup. In fact, when I heard them talking to the support guy, I think they were people from India who provide support. They keep you waiting and then they don't come up with a real solution. You need to call them back continuously to be able to get the solution. Conversely, I think the guys from the European team, perhaps Dell, are quite straight forward and they provide you solution very quickly.

Prior to this solution, we were using Veeam backup. We had a few issues with them in terms of scalability, so we were unable to continue using Veeam. This is the main reason we switched to Barracuda.

In my situation, it was quite complex because we had old servers fully updated recently. We had some issues in setting this up, as we had some conversions to do for the virtual machine. I don't really think that Barracuda is especially difficult to deploy, but given the situation in which we were here, at my premises, I think it was quite natural that we had some difficulties into setting it up.

In general, I don't think it would be difficult to set up.

The deployment took around a month. Our strategy was to convert and upgrade the servers to a level which they were compatible with the Barracuda solution. We had some conversions to do because we had some Hyper-V machines and some VM machines, and we needed to convert to VMware VMs. Once we set it up, we started the backup and we tested the rest on all other servers.

We purchased the solution through a local reseller. It was a great team, given the complex situation that we had here. Our servers were not updated for a long time, including one that was Windows 2003, which is very difficult to backup using this solution. Overall, they did a great job here.

We bought a five-year package, as opposed to paying a yearly licensing fee. The price of the five-year contract was approximately three million Rupees ($42,000 USD).

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to ensure that it is adapted to all of the current hardware that you have. Prepare yourself to upgrade the solution, if needed, for at least five years.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is not to underestimate the complexity of the implementation. The sellers suggest that it is easy, but you need to adapt it to your own environment.

This is a good solution, but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to back up our services from Hyper-V.

One of the most valuable aspects of the solution is the fact that we can go very granular on the backup and everything is from the outside. We don't need to make a rework of the backup server. If I want to restore a file I can go to the file without going through all of these other items.

The user interface is pretty good.

The configuration and the onboarding process are pretty good.

The initial setup is very easy.

The backup feature could be a bit simpler to utilize. They should make the process of backing up individual files simpler.

The pricing could be a bit better.

The solution should have the ability to back up other devices, such as mobile phones or tablets.

I've been using the solution for 20 years. It's been a long time.

The stability of the solution is very good. They have many models. in the end, we only choose four terabytes as it was enough for our servers. We haven't had any trouble at all with it so far. It's very reliable.

We haven't had any issues with scalability. The solution is quite flexible in sizing. A company should have issues if they need to expand it.

We are only using the product on approximately 15 servers.

If we need to open up a case, we're comfortable with doing so. The average time to respond is 24 hours, therefore, their response is pretty quick. If we have some working problem, our server will solve it. 

They also have quite a bit of documentation that can help you troubleshoot or understand the solution a little better.

Generally, if we have issues, we can go to the reseller to get immediate attention as well.

Overall, in general, when we open a ticket we receive a response in 24 hours or less. We're satisfied with how they handle their support services.

We didn't previously use another solution. The way we handled backups before was to manually do it ourselves.

The initial setup is not a complex process. It's very, very straightforward.

The first time we did a deployment, it only took about 45 minutes. The second time, when we had to take into account all of the backup jobs, it took about a week.

You only really need one person to handle deployment and maintenance. It doesn't take a large amount of staff.

We used a reseller. They assisted in the initial implementation. We worked fine together and we didn't have any problems. We were satisfied with the level of service they provided our company.

The licensing is charged yearly. It's my understanding that the cost of the solution is somewhere around $7,000 every two years.

I don't recall if there are any other costs over and above the standard license.

We're just a customer. We use the product. We're not resellers or consultants.

I'd advise those considering implementing the solution to first find someone who knows the appliance. Sometimes you can get lost in all of the functionality they have. It's very important to have at least one person who understands the solution pretty well if the company has plans to use Barracuda.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten. We've mostly been pretty happy with the product.

We are using it just for daily backups of our files. We have its latest version.

It does what it is supposed to do, which is restore old files. That's its main purpose, and that's how we use it. If someone deleted something or some files are missing, they can be easily restored.

Its interface is intuitive, and it is easy to use when I am restoring files.

Barracuda does a really excellent job at compression, which makes it very efficient. Eight years later, I am only halfway through to the capacity, which is very good.

The restore time can be improved. The restore time for large quantities of folders is slow. Sometimes, if I'm doing a full recovery of a server, it takes multiple hours, which probably is natural. It might also be because of our internet speed to the cloud.

I have been using this solution for eight years.

It has been running for eight years, so I'm happy with it.

Barracuda has a defined upgrade path, so scalability is there. We are a small company with about 40 people. We have just two people, myself and someone from the IT support, who use it when a user needs to recover a file. We also handle its maintenance and checkup.

Its usage is average. We sized the number of hard drives eight years ago, and we are at about 50%. It was the right size for the future. We're nowhere near maxing it out, so I would say we're in good shape. We currently don't have any need to increase its usage.

We called them once, and they were very cooperative. They have good support.

We were a lot smaller back then, and we had an on-premise tape backup. It was probably Iomega. We switched because of the cloud. It was just about streamlining and taking away a lot of pain points. Barracuda Backup is really easy in terms of maintenance, and I don't have to worry about changing tapes. It took a lot of the in-house burden away. It is almost like you set it and then forget it, whereas back then, you had to make sure that tapes are fine, and sometimes, tapes would fail.

We had a consultant to do it. Our experience with the consultant was positive. They had it working in a day or two.

We were in a jam one or two times, and we were happy that the backups were working. It is like insurance. You hope you never use it, but you have to buy it. The whole idea is that you back up your system and hope that you never have to restore it, but we did, and it came through. It did what it was designed to do. We have definitely got the return on investment. There was no loss of time or loss of files. 

It is about 6,900 or 7,000 a year. It goes up a little every year. Its price includes live updates, support, antivirus, and cloud storage. If I increase the cloud space, then the price would increase. It has been consistent for us.

I would rate Barracuda Backup a nine out of ten. It does what it is supposed to do, and it does it very efficiently. I would give them high grades for the compression.

We are a system integrator and Barracuda Backup is one of the products that we implement for our clients. It is primarily used for backing up data from the client's on-premises equipment to the cloud. It is a hybrid model.

What I like best about Barracuda Backup is the licensing model. It is not based on the number of nodes that you are backing up.

Inline deduplication is a valuable feature in this product. Not every backup solution has it.

All of the backups from the geographically diverse nodes are available from a central location.

The performance is good and the interface is user-friendly.

Scalability-wise, there is room for improvement.

I would like to see better integration with third-party applications.

We have been partners with Barracuda for between three and four years.

This product performs well and we have hardly had any problems with respect to stability in three years' time.

It is an appliance-based model, so it is not as easy to scale.

We have multiple clients who use this product. I think it is ideal for the smaller to medium-sized businesses.

The technical support is really good. We deal with the support team in India and we have found them to be very helpful, providing very valuable answers.

I have worked with similar products from other vendors and I think that Barracuda is easy to deploy and easy to manage, compared to some other products. The technical support is also very useful.

In terms of what they offer, backup solutions by different vendors are somewhat similar in functionality.

Barracuda Backup is very easy to set up and one individual can do it. If it is planned properly then you can be up and running in two hours.

We handle the deployment for our customers.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

My advice to anybody who is implementing Barracuda Backup is to take time to plan how it is going to be set up. Specifically, consider the connectivity with the backup client nodes. If it is done properly then you will have a minimum deployment time. If on the other hand, you have issues with connectivity, then it will add to your deployment time.

In summary, this is a good product and we plan to continue recommending it to our clients.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It is very reliable, so we don't have any issues with it. Our customers have never raised any issue with it. Basically, once you set it up and it is running, it is trouble-free. Our customers are happy. They just got a renewal for the subscription for the service.

It would be nice to have some reports generated on the usage of the system such as detailed backup statistics, but it is not essential.

I have been using this solution for about two or three years.

Our customers have never raised any issues.

We are a reseller, and we are a partner from the support standpoint. We actually don't have any issues. We never had to call their support.

They are very responsive if there is ever a problem. Because it is a service, customers directly deal with Barracuda. The only time we get involved is when there is a local problem with the hardware. Everything else is handled directly by Barracuda. They provide a very good service.

It is very easy. When we had our first installation, it was the first time for our team to set it up. They just went in there and followed the instructions, and it was running.

Normally, there is the hardware on the site. So, essentially, there is a server and storage. They can price it a little lower because the customers are making a little investment upfront. Even though it is trouble-free for the end-users, and once it is set up and running, they don't have to really think about it, there is essentially an initial investment.

It is not really pricey. We're actually competitive, but we are in a different market. In Asia, customers are a little more price-sensitive than in the west. It is not really a real issue.

I would definitely recommend it because it has been trouble-free for us.

I would rate Barracuda Backup a nine out of 10. I don't have any experience with a competing product, so my assessment would be biased.