Bacula

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This article is about computer backup software. For the penile bone found in some mammals, see baculum.

Bacula is an open source network based backup software. It is published under a modified version of the GPL2 license[1]. Its slogan is It comes by night and sucks the vital essence from your computers.

It supports remote backup of many operating systems, including Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Windows, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, HP-UX, Tru64 and IRIX.[2]

The backup data can be stored on various media like Tape, DVD or On-line Disk. In comparison with other high-end backup utilities Bacula has little to no firewall issues and good performance.

[edit] Structure

The structure of a Bacula setup revolves around three different daemons that run on clients (the machines that contain the files to be backed up), storage machines (machines that contain the media used to store the backups) and servers that control the backup process. The three daemons are:

Director: Controls all backup management tasks, controls database access, initiates backups
Storage Daemon: Handles Backup media and receives backup data
File Daemon: Handles data access, handles client-side encryption and compression, and of course the actual reading or restoring of data

One point of interest is that all information about which jobs to run, when to run the jobs and which files to back up, is controlled by the Director. The storage and file daemons only provide access to resources for the director to use. They have no control over the specifics of the backup process.

While this structure suggests that the three daemons should run on three different machines an equally valid setup is to run all three daemons on the machine that controls the backup process, and mount any remote files and storage resources into its filesystem over smb or nfs, for the file and storage daemons to access.