Bacula is a trademark of Kern Sibbald and John Walker. The Bacula software is under General Public License and available free of charge. Bacula in a nutshell

Bacula Backup

Bacula is a professional open source backup solution for networks which stands tall against its expensive proprietary competitors. Bacula offers all the important features you expect from a backup software, with more flexibility:

Backup and restore

As you would expect, Bacula covers all normal backup system functions:

• Scheduling of backup and job verification according to individual timetables
• Full, incremental and differential backups
• Data compression before storage
• Concurrent job prioritization
• Restoration of individual files or a complete client

Extensive network integration

Via a backup client, all relevant operating systems (Linux, Windows, Unix, Macintosh, etc.) can be backed up remote from the server. Authentication between server and client is secured with a CRAM-MD5 encrypted password. Because a system backup requires only one TCP port which can be released by firewalls, backups are also possible through a firewall. To save on bandwidth and memory, data is compressed up to 70% before transmission. Scripts can be run on the client before and after backups, eg. taking an application offline or executing a database dump.

Database catalogue management

All system transaction data is stored and archived on a local MySQL database. This allows individual jobs, different files or complete clients be restored. It is even possible to target database files matching a certain date to restore. With an individual expiration date, these entries are again later removed from the database.

Administrative advantages

The backed up data, compressed or uncompressed are saved in a platform independent format so both Linux and Windows backups can be saved in the same archive file. If the backup server (in a worst case scenario) was unavailable, then data can be directly extracted from the memory files through low-level tools. For normal daily administration, the console based front end offers a lean and fast management interface. Generated logs can also be viewed on this interface or sent to an administrator, depending on its configuration and how much information you want to receive.