StoneFly DR365V vs Barracuda Backup Appliance (2026)

Barracuda Backup's pitch is simplicity. One product, one subscription, unlimited cloud storage included. You plug the appliance in, point it at your workloads, and Barracuda Cloud handles the retention and off-site replica. For small sites with simple requirements, it's a clean proposition.

StoneFly DR365V takes the opposite position. Keep the primary backup copy on-premises in an air-gapped vault. Treat cloud as a secondary tier, and pick the cloud target that fits your sovereignty, cost, and retention needs. Cloud replication is optional, not structural to the product.

Both approaches are defensible. The question is how your DR plan handles a bad day. If the bad day is a ransomware event where local systems are compromised but your internet is fine, Barracuda's cloud-side copy is a solid recovery path. If the bad day involves a physical incident that takes out the site *and* the internet (fire, flood, storm, extended outage), an appliance that can boot workloads from a local air-gapped vault without cloud dependency is the more resilient architecture.

The structural difference is where the immutable copy of data lives.

Barracuda Backup places the immutable copy in Barracuda Cloud. Local appliance backups are useful for fast recovery but they are not the ransomware-resistant copy. If ransomware compromises both the production environment and the backup appliance, the cloud replica is the copy that survives. This model works if your internet connection is reliable enough to sustain restore traffic during a recovery event.

DR365V runs a local air-gapped vault that physically disconnects from the backup network between scheduled vault windows. Even if ransomware moves across your entire production and backup network, the vault tier was offline during the compromise and comes online only when the attack is contained. You can recover from the vault without cloud connectivity at all.

For Australian partners serving regional and remote customers, where internet reliability is uneven, the local-vault model is less fragile. For metro customers with well-provisioned cloud connectivity, the difference is smaller.

The 'unlimited cloud storage included' story is the main Barracuda sales angle. It's real, and it's attractive for environments where long-retention obligations would otherwise add a meaningful monthly spend on cloud storage.

The trade-off is that the cloud copy only works with Barracuda Cloud. You cannot point Barracuda Backup at AWS S3, Azure Blob, Wasabi, or your own private S3. If you ever want to move to a different cloud target, the migration is full catalogue rebuild.

DR365V charges for cloud storage separately, which looks more expensive in isolation. In practice, pairing DR365V with Wasabi Sydney or StoneFly Cloud Vault typically lands at AUD 6-8 per TB per month, with no egress fees and full vendor portability. For a customer with 20 TB of long-retention backup, the delta versus the Barracuda subscription cost is often neutral or better on a three-year view. The critical difference is optionality.

Choose Barracuda Backup when:

• Your customer base is predominantly small sites with simple backup requirements.
• Unlimited cloud storage inclusion is a meaningful sales angle for your book of business.
• You're comfortable with Barracuda Cloud as the sole off-site replication target.
• Internet reliability is not a constraint in your customer geography.

Choose StoneFly DR365V when:

• Local air-gapped immutability is a compliance or resilience requirement.
• You serve customers with uneven internet reliability (regional ANZ, Pacific).
• You want optionality on cloud replication target (AWS, Wasabi, StoneFly Cloud Vault, customer's own S3).
• You already run or plan to run Veeam and want a portable backup catalogue.
• You're scaling past a few dozen protected servers and capacity economics start to matter.

CRS distributes DR365V, Veeam licensing, and cloud replication targets as a single quote across ANZ and the Pacific. For partners who want the cloud-inclusive simplicity that Barracuda offers but without the vendor tie, we typically pair DR365V with StoneFly Cloud Vault (Wasabi-backed, Sydney-hosted, immutable) or Wasabi Sydney direct. The combined per-TB economics are competitive with Barracuda and you retain full optionality on the cloud tier.