Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Barracuda makes hybrid backup even more affordable

Businesses worried about managing a hybrid data protection strategy will find a lot to like about Barracuda's Backup appliances, as they do everything for you. Offered as physical or virtual appliances, they provide on-site backup, cloud replication, and full data restoration services. Plus, optional site-to-site replication with everything managed from a single cloud portal.

They're about to get more appealing, too, as Barracuda has introduced a completely new family of appliance models and moved from complex capacity-based licensing to a pure subscription model. Choices have been simplified as the old range, which comprised around ten different models, has been reduced to four.

The new appliances overcome the capacity limitations of their predecessors, which required you to migrate to the next model up if you ran out of backup space. They come with much higher capacities, allowing you to pay for what you want now and apply a licence upgrade when you need more.

In this review, we test the entry-level Backup 3004, which targets small businesses and edge scenarios and replaces the Backup 190, 290, 295, and 390 models. Delivered as a compact fan-less desktop box, it comes with a pair of 2TB SATA SSDs and supports environments that require around 1TB-2TB of backup capacity.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Subscriptions and prices

The two SSDs are configured as one non-redundant 4TB logical volume at the OS level, and it's worth going over the new subscriptions as Barracuda has radically updated them. There's no longer a charge for the appliance as this is now included with the new licences.

Starting at £110 per month for local backup support, a 1TB licence generously provisions 2TB of local storage, and adding another 1TB licence enables the full 4TB. If you want cloud storage, the 'CLD' licence starts at £210 per month, which includes the appliance, 2TB of storage for local backup, and all the cloud storage needed to replicate everything offsite.

Even better, these prices include full technical support plus the Energize Updates and Instant Replacement services, which all used to be separate purchases. For £260 per month, you can upgrade to Premium Support, which assigns a dedicated engineer, provides monthly check-ins, and regular reviews of your configurations.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Easy deployment

The Backup 3004 comes with dual Gigabit ports, but you only need to connect the first one for initial installation – the second can be configured later on as a redundant network link. There are also HDMI and USB ports, and it's worth connecting a monitor and keyboard at this stage to view the appliance's local console and, if required, give it a static IP address.

All further action takes place in the Barracuda Cloud portal, where we entered the appliance's serial number and linking code and waited two minutes while it registered with our account. From the local console, we could see that the LAN, internet, and cloud connections were up, and the appliance duly appeared online in our portal.

The portal provides a single point of access to all Barracuda cloud-managed products, and selecting the Backup option shows all registered appliances. It presents an informative dashboard with donut graphs for backup source status, used and available appliance storage, and data reduction efficiency, with further charts showing subscriptions, backup status for the last five jobs, storage allocation, and current active tasks.

We had all licences enabled for our appliance, so the storage chart showed the full 4TB, and with the appliance performing efficient variable block-level deduplication, actual capacity will be significantly higher – our tests returned an impressive 78% reduction. Essential ransomware protection is also provided as Barracuda's cloud repository is air-gapped and immutable.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Backup management

The price includes unlimited client support, and backup sources are declared to the portal, which provides download links for small footprint agents for Windows, macOS, and Linux hosts. These take seconds to install and automatically encrypt communications between the host and appliance.

To declare our VMware hosts we only had to supply the IP addresses and credentials of our vCenter hosts, while for Hyper-V hosts, you have two options. If you load the agent only on the host, it'll run storage-hungry image-based VM backups, while loading it in each VM enables more efficient incremental backups and full protection for virtualised apps.

Sources are assigned to a default backup schedule, which automatically backs up everything in them once a day with Barracuda employing an 'incremental forever' strategy, which runs one full backup for each source, followed by regular incrementals. We found it simple to create custom schedules, assign specific sources, choose items to back up, and repeat jobs as often as every 15 minutes.

Enabling cloud replication couldn't be easier, as you check one extra box when defining your schedules. The Backup 3004 can also function as a sender to a remote Barracuda receiver appliance for site-to-site replication, which also requires one tick to activate.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Recovery features

Data recovery options are plentiful, as we could select systems from the portal's restore browser, choose files, folders, and SQL databases, and recover them directly from the appliance or download them from our cloud repository. More ransomware protection is provided as you can apply custom retention policies, which determine how many days, weeks, months, and years you want backup copies to be retained.

VM recovery options are equally good as they can be restored back to the original host or another system with the LiveBoot option, restoring VMware VMs back to the host and using the appliance for datastore duties. The Cloud LiveBoot feature can run them in the cloud repository for up to 7 days, and another bonus is that it's now included in your subscription.

Failed systems can be brought back to life by downloading the bare metal recovery kit from the portal and using it to restore them from the appliance. Barracuda has you covered if internet access goes down, as the appliance has its own local web console, which can be used to run restore and LiveBoot operations.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Is it worth it?

Barracuda's new subscription models look like good value and simplify the acquisition process immensely, as the multiple options presented by the older licensing system made it difficult to manage costs. Providing the new appliances with spare storage capacity that can be enabled with upgrade licences as required also provides superior future-proofing.

These new features make the Backup 3004 a great choice for smaller businesses seeking an affordable on-premises data protection solution for physical and virtualised environments. It's easy to install, simple to manage from the cloud portal, and makes light work of managing a hybrid backup strategy.

Barracuda Backup 3004 specifications