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
.
Architecture
Bacula is made up of the following five major components or services:
Director, Console, Client, Storage, and Catalog.
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 Systems
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. . The two others, MySQL and PostgreSQL, provide quite a number of features, including rapid indexing, arbitrary queries, and security.
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:
- With a bootstrap file, you can restore without a Catalog;
- Bacula uses bootstrap files in Restore, Migrate or Copy Jobs, and more;
- The bootstrap files are created and updated automatically for each Job defined when they run.
bsbuild
2025-03-27