Loading...From the very beginning of its development, Bacula was built as a native Linux-based backup system. The suitability of Linux as the core operating system for both development and usage of an enterprise backup solution made it the foundation OS of choice for Bacula. Bacula is an enterprise-ready, agile solution capable of both backing up and restoring data in the shortest amount of time possible. Bacula has a reputation of being an extremely flexible, secure and free Linux backup software and, to date, has had more downloads than any other open source Linux backup software. It supports a wide variety of backup types - from physical to virtual to cloud backup that supports Amazon S3. It also offers further flexibility on the storage side, integrating with disks, arrays, and a wide range of tape drives. Bacula is known to work perfectly well with SCSI tape drivers on FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, and Windows machines.
Bacula uses its wide array of tools and abilities to backup, protect and restore large amounts of Linux-based data. Surprisingly enough, Bacula as a system is both user-friendly and highly customizable - in fact, it can be considered one of the most customizable backup solutions available anywhere.
Here are some of the benefits of using Bacula backup and restore software as your backup solution for Linux-based systems:
- A wide variety of possible backup levels and techniques, including full, differential, incremental, virtual full and more
- Ability to both backup and restore entire systems or single files with just a few clicks or console commands
- Cloud backup support for S3
- Capability of using snapshots on Linux/Unix systems. Snapshots can be automatically created and used to backup files. It is also possible to manage Snapshots from Bacula’s bconsole tool through a unique interface.
- Use either command line and/or GUI to execute and control your backup process
- Use partition backup for your Linux data storages to keep precise images of these disks for easy management and recovery
Bacula, as a free Linux backup software, works with most of the popular variations of Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat and a lot more. Its open-source development and design allows the solution as a whole to work well with almost any Linux-based system with both performance and stability. One such example is backing up databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL - both backup and restore is achieved with speed and ease, combined with granular control over data.
The variety and complexity of Bacula’s features as a free Linux backup solution allows for a wide variety of all kinds of features including:
- Tape backup is fully supported by Bacula and allows to work with a variety of different tape drives, autoloaders and autochangers. VTL support is also included. Bacula also supports WORM tape support.
- As an open source Linux backup software, Bacula supports multi-volume backups
- A full comprehensive SQL standard database of all files backed up. This means that online viewing can be done of files saved on any particular Volume.
- Aligned Volumes deduplication is a type of data deduplication developed by Bacula that is fast, and efficient. It intelligently optimizes the placement of files so that an underlying deduplicating filesystem (ZFS, for example) can optimally deduplicate the backup data that is written by Bacula.
- Drivers currently exist for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Any SQL database engine can be used, so SQL databases can be backed up with reliability and speed.
- The option to use Baculum as an intuitive GUI alternative to working directly with a Linux console.
- Bare metal recovery allows for easy system recovery from the ground up to the last backup point. This is mostly automated for Linux systems and can be used as part of a disaster recovery strategy. A rescue CD for Linux systems is also available
- Backup a wide variety of virtual machine data like VMware, Red Hat, Hyper-V, KVM and more. Placing a Bacula file daemon on the virtual machine allows you to restore your virtual machine data with a high level of control.
- Automating both backup and restore operations is also available with Bacula as part of its wide customizability, such as scheduler, scripting, task maintenance and so on.
- Cloud backup with Bacula is able to work with Amazon and S3.
If you're also interested in VMware Backup, check out the Bacula's solution.
