Subsections


What is Bacula?

Bacula is a set of computer btools that permits the system administrator to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. Bacula can also run entirely upon a single computer and can backup to various types of media, including tape and disk.

Bacula provides the following key features:

Network Based
All backup and restores are done via the network. This permits Bacula to run on a single server and backup any computer in your data center.

Centralized Administration
Bacula administration is centralized in the Director. Centralizing the administration is essential when your network grows beyond a few computers.

Runs Automatically
Once setup, Bacula runs automatically. Normally a properly configured Bacula installation requires little maintenance or intervention except when adding new machines or when hardware errors occur.

Performs Bookkeeping
Bacula does the 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 btool rather than requiring human intervention.

Multi-platform
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.

Modular Design
means it scales well from small shops (one machine) to very large ones (tens of thousands of machines).

Multiple Backup Media
Bacula handles a variety of different media such as disk, tape, autochangers. There is no need for expensive Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL), Bacula knows how to write to disk out of the box.

Reliable
Bacula includes advance tools for memory and lock management, it is very common to run it without problems months at a time.

High Performance
Bacula's modern multi-threaded design allows running multiple simultaneous backups and can achieve speeds writing to tape at more than 200 Megabytes per second, or faster.

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

Rapid Restores
Easy and rapid restores using Bacula's database and graphical user interface.

Advanced Reporting, Notification, Monitoring
Bacula has excellent reporting addons such as BWeb; those tools permit 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\textregistered.


Architecture

Bacula is made up of the following five major components or services: Director, Console, Client, Storage, and Catalog.

Bacula Components


Bacula Director

The Bacula Director is the btool that supervises all the backup, restore and verify operations. The system administrator uses the Bacula Director to schedule backups and to recover files. The Director runs as a daemon (or service) in the background. If configured by the system administrator, users may access the Director to do backups or restores of their files through restricted consoles.


Bacula Console

The Bacula Console is the btool that allows the administrator or user to communicate with the Bacula Director. Bacula Consoles are available with different user front ends: text-based console interface, graphical user interface, and web interface. The first and simplest is to run the bconsole btool in a shell window (i.e. TTY interface). Most system administrators will find this completely adequate. There are several graphical user interfaces, the most comprehensive being bat (Bacula Administration Tool) written using the Qt4 toolkit. There are also several web interfaces, the most complete being BWeb Management Suite available in the Bacula Enterprise version.


Bacula Client

The Bacula Client service (also known as the File Daemon) is the software btool that is installed on each machine to be backed up. It is specific to the operating system on which it runs and is responsible for providing the file attributes and data when requested by the Director. The Client services are also responsible for the file system dependent part of restoring the file attributes and data during a recovery operation. This btool runs as a daemon on the machine to be backed up.

Bacula Enterprise clients, distributed as binary packages, are available for a wide variety of Operating SystemsnoteGnu/Linux flavors, Windows systems, Solaris, Mac OSX, AIX, HP-UX and more


Bacula Storage

The Bacula Storage service is the software btool that performs the storage and recovery of the file attributes and data to the physical backup media or volumes. In other words, the Storage Daemon is responsible for reading and writing your tapes (or other storage media, e.g. files). The Storage services runs as a daemon on the machine that has the backup device (for example a tape drive or a large disk).


Catalog

The Catalog services are comprised of the software btools responsible for maintaining the file indexes and volume databases for all files backed up. The Catalog services permit the system administrator or user to quickly locate and restore any desired file. The Catalog services sets Bacula apart from simple archiver btools like tar and dump, because the catalog maintains a record of all Volumes used, all Jobs run, and all Files saved, permitting efficient restoration and Volume management.


Bacula can run with three SQL database backends: MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. We strongly recommend using SQLite only for testing purposes.noteActually, Bacula Systems does not even provide packages with SQLite as a Catalog database backend. . The two others, MySQL and PostgreSQL, provide quite a number of features, including rapid indexing, arbitrary queries, and security.

Bootstrap File Concept

A bootstrap file is an ASCII file containing just the information Bacula needs to find a specific set of data and it is really important in Bacula:

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