About Bacula Enterprise

The following document aims at introducing the reader to what Bacula Enterprise, or simply: Bacula -is, and what its main features are. It is meant for anybody who wants to have basic understanding of Bacula.

What is Bacula Enterprise?

Bacula is a highly secure, enterprise-class, feature-rich software that allows system administrators to easily manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. Bacula can run entirely upon a single computer and can backup to various types of media, including tape and disk. It is independent of both hardware and infrastructure, can run on any brand of computer and fits neatly into on-premise as well as hybrid deployment or full cloud infrastructure. It is especially stable, reliable, secure and massively scalable. The broad support of plugins enormously simplifies the backup of complex sites and technologies. Bacula is used in both small deployments and in extremely large organizations, as well as HPC (High Performance Computing) environments.

Features

Bacula brings rich new features and enhancements for backup and data recovery to enterprises, data centers and managed service providers. A comprehensive list of features, organized by categories is presented below:

Bacula Users and Administrators

When considering enterprise backup and recovery environments, it is often useful to distinguish between different types or classes of people interacting with the backup and recovery tool:

Administrators - can control all aspects of Bacula, and modify its configuration.
Operators - interact with Bacula, following defined procedures, are responsible for certain operational aspects, but do not touch the configuration.
Users or end-users - people who have no access to the Bacula configuration or all Bacula’s features, but may access certain of its functions. A typical example is that a user can restore their own data, to their own computer, but cannot see other backup data or access computers for which they are not responsible.

Bacula itself does not have the concept of users or administrators, but has Consoles that are designed to allow some users to have limited permissions. However, the BWeb Management Suite - the Bacula Enterprise Web-based tool for management and configuration - includes the concepts of users, groups and permissions.