Core Features

The following article presents the core features of Bacula.

Bacula is:

  • Especially secure – Bacula’s modular architecture is designed to offer higher levels of security than other solutions. It also has a broad set of additional and specific security features to enable IT department leaders to implement a high security strategy that meets best practices and zero-trust policies.

  • Network-based – all backups and restores are done via the network. This allows Bacula to run on a single server, and backup any computer in your data center.

  • Centrally administered – Bacula administration is centralized in the Director. Centralizing the administration is essential when your network grows beyond a few computers.

  • Run automatically – once set up, Bacula runs automatically. Normally, a properly configured Bacula installation requires little maintenance or intervention, except when adding new machines, or when hardware errors occur.

  • Able to perform bookkeeping – Bacula does hard bookkeeping by maintaining a catalog of what is backed up and where. If you have hundreds or thousands of machines to be backed up, it is essential that the bookkeeping is automatically maintained by a program rather than requiring human intervention.

  • Responsive to multiple platforms - Bacula is compatible with a wide range of platforms: BSD, Unix, Linux, MS Windows, Mac OS X, and others as well as a large range of hardware.

  • Modularly designed – means it scales well from small shops (one machine) to very large ones (tens of thousands of machines).

  • Responsive to multiple backup media – Bacula handles a variety of different media such as local disks, network disks, block storage, tapes, autochangers or cloud devices.

  • Reliable – Bacula consists of advance tools for memory and lock management. It is very common to run it without problems for months.

  • Characterized by high performance – Bacula’s modern multi-threaded design allows running multiple simultaneous backups and can achieve high speeds writing to disk, tape or cloud.

  • Customizable – Bacula can be easily customized to almost any backup/restore need.

  • Able to restore data rapidly - easy and fast restores using Bacula’s database and graphical user interface.

  • Equipped with advanced reporting, notification, monitoring systems – Bacula has excellent reporting addons such as Bweb, which allows to get graphical and raw statistics for custom reports, billings, trends, optimizations and capacity planning. Bacula provides very good notifications and monitoring capabilities, and can also be extremely well-integrated into monitoring tools such as Nagios.

  • Providing extremely good interoperability through:

    • Full featured REST API

    • Full featured Console User Interface

    • Script-friendly configuration files

    • Ability to expand any job capabilities with additional pre or post script

  • Including advanced backup policies:

  • Including advanced operation capabilities, such as:

    • Restart incomplete jobs features

    • Bandwidth limitation

    • Job sequencing using priorities

    • Customize restore operations to the original source or to a different target

  • Enormously scalable - Bacula is scalable from small single computer systems to systems consisting of hundreds or thousands of computers located over a large network.

  • Its highly modular architecture is specifically designed to manage:

    • Billions of file/object records in the catalog

    • Large amounts of data (PB per storage)

    • Thousands of Clients per Director

    • Each Daemon/Service can be separated on the network

    • Ability to extract single files from snapshots such as virtual machine

See also

Go to:

Go back to the About Bacula Enterprise chapter.

Go back to the Bacula Enterprise Fundamentals chapter.