No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Bacula Enterprise vs Dell PowerProtect Data Domain comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Bacula Enterprise
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (25th), Cloud Backup (19th)
Dell PowerProtect Data Domain
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (1st), Disk Based Backup Systems (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Bacula Enterprise and Dell PowerProtect Data Domain aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Bacula Enterprise is designed for Backup and Recovery and holds a mindshare of 1.0%, up 1.0% compared to last year.
Dell PowerProtect Data Domain, on the other hand, focuses on Deduplication Software, holds 20.9% mindshare, down 28.3% since last year.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Bacula Enterprise1.0%
Veeam Data Platform5.8%
Commvault Cloud3.4%
Other89.8%
Backup and Recovery
Deduplication Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell PowerProtect Data Domain20.9%
HPE StoreOnce17.1%
Dell PowerProtect Data Manager10.8%
Other51.2%
Deduplication Software
 

Featured Reviews

Davilson  Aguiar - PeerSpot reviewer
Analista Tecnologia Banco de Dados at Centro de Gestão da Tecnologia da Informação
Very cost-effective and well organized with good compression
It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company. A managerial user who wants more information beyond the operational technician should be able to access it. It could include greater transparency regarding the volume of data trafficked on the network, as well as the expectation of deduplication. A more practical strategy could come with a backup policy model as a suggestion for both large and small companies. A simple suggestion is to visually implement the backup time as far as your physical media.
Branko Cirovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at Comtrade Group
Provides seamless backup integration and long-term reliability for enterprise data protection
The price is quite high; this product is not considered cheap. Additionally, if you use higher availability boxes, they also come at a premium price. However, they provide business continuity, which is the main reason why companies invest in this solution. Tape is slow; when restoring several virtual machines or databases amounting to several terabytes, Dell PowerProtect Data Domain represents the fastest and most reliable solution, ensuring great integration with backup software. If a customer has limited budget constraints, they may opt for cheaper external storage comprised of just a bunch of disks and utilize it for backup, as backup is not a business-critical service. However, I see great value in Dell PowerProtect Data Domain because it is fully automated, features great integration with backup software, and provides good value for money. I would rate software support as a ten, while I would give hardware support a seven. I never give any product a perfect score; I think Dell PowerProtect Data Domain deserves a nine. The only minor problems are the certificate issue and the price. These certificate issues are quite rare and mainly arise when we forget to restart and upgrade the box for several years.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its ease of use; it works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"Technical support is excellent in my opinion."
"The solution has had a tremendous impact on our public company, as we are now cost-effective and even better on performance with our restorations."
"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"We have never had any issues with Data Domain. It has been stable."
"It is a stable solution."
"The dedup and data compression actually benefit our floor space in the data center, and we are able to reduce our backup storage, which used to be a legacy large footprint, into something more concise."
"The solution is stable, very reliable, and designed for what they call 99.999% uptime, which is less than an hour a year of downtime."
"We see data reduction by up to 60 times with Dell PowerProtect Data Domain, but it depends on the backup application the customers use."
"The most valuable features of this product are its guaranteed reliability and its duplication capability."
"There was an eighty percent improvement with EMC Data Domain."
"The deduplication feature is the most valuable part of the solution."
 

Cons

"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"Bacula needs a graphical user interface because, for administrators, the command-line interface is okay, but for the average user it is not very easy."
"The interface needs to be easier for adding new devices to be managed."
"Relying solely on a desktop is a bit frustrating as its GUI isn't exactly responsive."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"The last downtime for upgrading the model 9410 took a long time, approximately two hours, which could be bad for production environments."
"They're scalable."
"The price is also a disadvantage. Price is a disadvantage with the PowerProtect as it needs to be cheaper."
"PowerProtect DD should improve the hypervisor support on the DD system."
"The pricing should be adjusted."
"The price of the product is high."
"I have not observed any significant time savings, resource savings, or efficiency improvements with Dell PowerProtect Data Domain."
"The tool's pricing could be cheaper."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"We usually buy products at the end year, and the license is included."
"I can't remember what the license costs are. They might be paid monthly or every two months."
"In Naira it was twenty-five or twenty-seven million (approximately $75,000 USD) for the implementation and maintenance cost for three years."
"There are many options in the pricing structure which can cause some confusion and necessitate the purchase of additional licensing."
"Pricing for this product could still be improved, though several years ago, its price was very high. When buying an IDPA product such as Dell EMC PowerProtect DD (Data Domain), you don't have to buy anything else, because you'll have an integrated solution: a data domain appliance plus software."
"The yearly subscription is very affordable for our customers, but the price could be a little cheaper overall."
"The price is on the high side."
"The price of Dell EMC PowerProtect DD could improve, it is expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Backup and Recovery solutions are best for your needs.
902,417 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business39
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise44
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bacula Enterprise?
Bacula is more expensive than various other solutions. It’s almost completely commercial now. Products like Veeam software are much more expensive.
What needs improvement with Bacula Enterprise?
Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability.
What is your primary use case for Bacula Enterprise?
The last scenario in which I used Bacula was for a customer who needed some open-source tool which could support encryption at that time. We managed to convince the customer to use Bacula to deploy...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerProtect DD (Data Domain)?
My main use case for Dell PowerProtect Data Domain is as a data backup target.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain)?
Pricing, setup cost, and licensing are not my areas of expertise, as I mainly focus on implementation engineering.
What needs improvement with Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain)?
To improve Dell PowerProtect Data Domain, I would suggest making it cheaper. I would like to see the ability to use more back end data ports as a new feature.
 

Also Known As

No data available
DataDomain, Dell EMC Data Domain, PowerProtect Data Domain
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA, SwissCom, Navisite, Turner Studios, Bank Austria, Caixa Bank, SdV Plurimedia, Leibniz University Hannover, Zeta Global, Tricore, NetLog, Siemens, LocaWeb, wbsGo, itesys, Queens School of Computing, Escrypt.
The US Army, City of Houston, Lloyds TSB, TiVo, Teck, Ingram Entertainment, The New York Mets
Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Rubrik and others in Backup and Recovery. Updated: June 2026.
902,417 professionals have used our research since 2012.