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New features in the Bareos Bacula fork

Better Backups

Article from ADMIN 17/2013

By Jörg Steffens , By Philipp Storz

Available on almost all platforms, the open source backup software Bacula is popular with many administrators – now the Bareos fork is poised to expand its leading role.

For years, an open source version of Bacula has been a popular solution for managing "backup, recovery, and verification of computer data" [1] on a network of diverse computers, operating systems, and storage media. Using the client-server model, Bacula scales from single computers to enterprise installations of hundreds of entities.

The open source version of Bacula was first published in 2002 and quickly found support in the community. Recently, less and less work has been put into the free Bacula, and new commits into the public Git project now occur only once every few months, with the developers seemingly focusing on the commercial Bacula Enterprise Edition, which is not publicly developed.

In 2010, long-standing Bacula developer Marco van Wieringen thus started to maintain enhancements and code cleanups that either were not accepted or were only proposed for integration into the commercial version in a separate Git repository. From this seed grew the decision by some former members of the Bacula community to continue development of an independent fork named Bareos.

The first stable release was Bareos 12.4 in April 2013 (the version number stands for the year and the quarter of the feature freeze). The current beta is version 13.2. On September 25, 2013, at the Open Source Backup Conference, formerly known as the Bacula Conference [2], the Bareos project was introduced to an interested audience.

Before you start working with Bacula or Bareos or start planning a test installation, you should take a look how the tools function (Figure 1). The basic structure always consists of a control unit, the Backup Director, one or more Storage daemons, and the File daemons on the clients to be backed up.

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