Bacula Enterprise integrates the core features from Bacula community projects with specific advanced technologies to create one of the most powerful and stable enterprise-class backup & restore solutions available. It includes exclusive features as well as specific plugins to modernize your data recovery strategy, increase your efficiency, and significantly drive costs down.

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Main Features Summary

  • Snapshot technology and Snapshot Management to get a read-only copy of the data set frozen at a point in time which allows applications to continue writing their data
  • Windows Encrypting File System (EFS) enabling files to be transparently encrypted to protect confidential data from attackers with physical access to the computer
  • Differential, Full, Incremental, and ‘virtual-full’ backup and data recovery functionality
  • Global Endpoint deduplication™ (deduplication from the client to the storage) capabilities to greatly save hardware costs and minimize network bandwidth utilization
  • Native cloud integration – via S3, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud interface
  • Progressive Virtual Full capability for massive time-saving
  • VMware client-free support plugin featuring Single File Restore for VMware
  • Storage Daemon to Storage Daemon (SD2SD) for replication capabilities, with deduplication
  • Storage Daemon on Windows systems
  • Storage Daemon calls File Daemon (Firewall)
  • Storage Daemon Reporting allows to retrieve a range of information such as available disk space and disk usage information
  • REST API to define, easily and with a standard programming tool, new services for MSPs’ customers
  • BCloud Service, advanced self service backup for hosting companies, MSPs, IaaS and BaaS providers
  • Bacula Enterprise Edition database specific structure for speed improvement, more information stored and allowing 10 000 servers per director
  • Comm line compression allowing to divide by 3 the volume of data transmitted across communication lines
  • All drive plugin to automatically generate a Fileset including all drives in a Windows environment
  • Filesystems deduplication (Aligned Volume Format)
  • Directory Server plugin (OpenLDAP and Active Directory)
  • Bacula Microsoft VSS plugin with support for MS SQL Server and MS Exchange
  • Bacula MSSQL VDI Plugin
  • Bare Metal Recovery plugin for Linux and Windows systems (with UEFI and EFI support)
  • NDMP tool
  • VMware client-free tool
  • Red Hat Virtualization tool
  • KVM tool
  • Hyper-V tool
  • Xen tool
  • Promox tool
  • SAN Shared Tape Library Module
  • Oracle tool
  • SAP tool
  • SAP HANA tool
  • MySQL tool
  • PostgreSQL tool
  • Delta tool
  • Incremental Accelerator for NetApp
  • BWeb Management Suite to configure, deploy, analyse and manage your Backup & Restore infrastructure
  • Client Initiated Backup
  • Restart incomplete jobs
  • Stop and restart jobs
  • Bandwidth limitation
  • Always back up a file
  • Backup and restore clients of any type ensuring that all (and many types of) attributes of files are properly saved and restored
  • Multi-volume backups and data recovery supported
  • A full comprehensive SQL standard database of all files backed up. This permits online viewing of files saved on any particular volume, and advanced reporting capabilities.
  • Automatic pruning of the database (removal of old records), thus simplifying database administration.
  • Compatibility with most popular SQL databases. Plugins currently exist for MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL
  • Built-in Job scheduler
  • Multi-threaded implementation
  • A comprehensive and extensible configuration file for each daemon
  • Multiple jobs can read the same disk Volume simultaneouslybee_features
  • Virtual Full enhancements
  • BSys-alert script (predictive support)
  • Support for Windows mount point snapshots
  • Improved cancellation of jobs while despooling
  • Reduction of lock contention in the Storage daemon

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Features in more details

Job Control:

  • Network backup/restore with centralized Director
  • Internal scheduler for automatic Job execution
  • Scheduling of multiple Jobs at the same time
  • You may run one Job at a time or multiple simultaneous Jobs (sometimes called multiplexing)
  • Job sequencing using priorities
  • GUI interface (Bacula Administration Tool aka BAT)

State of the art Security:

  • FIPS 140-2 compliant
  • Data encryption cipher (AES 128, AES192, AES256 or blowfish) and the digest algorithm
  • Windows Encrypting File System (EFS)
  • Verify the reliability of existing backed up data or detect Silent Data Corruption
  • Verification of files previously catalogued, permitting a Tripwire like capability (system break-in detection)
  • CRAM-MD5 password authentication between each component (daemon)
  • Configurable TLS (SSL) communications encryption between each component
  • Configurable Data (on Volume) encryption on a Client by Client basis
  • Computation of MD5 or SHA1 signatures of the file data if requested

Data Recovery Features:

  • Restore options available at configuration step for all plugins for higher restore process reliability
  • Restore of one or more files selected interactively either for the current backup or a backup prior to a specified time and date
  • Restore of a complete system starting from bare metal. This is mostly automated for Linux systems and for Solaris
  • Listing and Restoration of files using stand-alone bls and bextract tool programs. Among other things, this permits extraction of files when Bacula® and/or the catalog are not available. Note, the recommended way to restore files is using the restore command in the Console. These programs are designed for use as a last resort
  • Ability to restore the catalog database rapidly by using bootstrap files (previously saved)
  • Ability to recreate the catalog database by scanning backup Volumes using the bscan program

SQL Catalog:

  • Catalog database facility for remembering Volumes, Pools, Jobs, and Files backed up
  • Support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite Catalog databases
  • User extensible queries to the MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite databases

Advanced Volume and Pool Management:

  • Labeled Volumes, preventing accidental overwriting (at least by Bacula). Bacula Enterprise Edition also supports IBM /ANSI tape labels, which are recognized by many enterprise tape-managing softwares
  • Any number of Jobs and Clients can be backed up to a single Volume. That is, you can backup and restore Linux, Unix, Sun, and Windows machines to the same Volume. You can also save jobs from different dates on one volume
  • Multi-volume saves. When a Volume is full, Bacula automatically requests the next Volume and continues the backup
  • Pool and Volume library management providing Volume flexibility (e.g. monthly, weekly, daily Volume sets, Volume sets segregated by Client)
  • Machine independent Volume data format. Linux, Solaris, and Windows clients can all be backed up to the same Volume if desired
  • The Volume data format is upwards compatible so that old Volumes can always be read
  • A flexible message handler including routing of messages from any daemon back to the Director and automatic email reporting
  • Data spooling to disk during backup with subsequent write to tape from the spooled disk files. This prevents tape “shoe shine” during Incremental/Differential backups

Advanced Support for most Storage Devices:

  • Autochanger support using a simple shell interface that can interface to virtually any autoloader program. A script for mtx is providedBWeb_cube
  • Support for autochanger barcodes; automatic tape labeling from barcodes
  • Automatic support for multiple autochanger magazines either using barcodes or by reading the tapes
  • Support for multiple drive autochangers
  • All Volume blocks (approximately 64K bytes) contain a data checksum
  • Migration support: move data from one Pool to another or one Volume to another

Miscellaneous:

  • Multi-threaded implementation
  • A comprehensive and extensible configuration file for each daemon
  • Storage Daemon Reporting
  • Console interface to the Director allowing complete control
  • Raw device backup/restore. Restore must be to the same device

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Further help:

  • Doing backup to tape media? Take a look at our tape backup solutions.
  • Need to see all our backup tools? Full hypervisor and database support.
  • Our server backup solutions include Windows, Linux and are flexible and customizable to your infrastructure.
  • Does Bacula support your storage type? Take a look at out storage backup solutions.
  • Training is available in different locations, depending on the Certified Bacula Systems Training Center you choose.