Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 2, 2026

Bacula

Bacula is an open-source, enterprise-level computer backup system for heterogeneous networks. It is designed to automate backup tasks that had often required intervention from a systems administrator or computer operator.

Last revised
Jun 2, 2026
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Wikipedia ↗
Bacula
DevelopersKern Sibbald and team
Initial releaseJanuary 2000 (2000-01)
Stable release
15.0.21 / 22 March 2024 (22 March 2024)
Written inC, C++
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeBackup
LicenseGNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Websitewww.bacula.org Edit this on Wikidata

Bacula is an open-source, enterprise-level computer backup system for heterogeneous networks. It is designed to automate backup tasks that had often required intervention from a systems administrator or computer operator.

Bacula supports Linux, UNIX, Windows, and macOS backup clients, and a range of professional backup devices including tape libraries. Administrators and operators can configure the system via a command line, GUI or web interface; its back-end is a catalog of information stored by MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite.

Overview

Bacula is a set of computer programs for managing backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network—providing a backup solution for mixed operating system environments.

Bacula is open-source and released under the AGPL version 3 license with exceptions to permit linking with OpenSSL and distributing Windows binaries.2

Bacula is available under a "dual license" (see Multi-licensing) AGPLv3 or Proprietary license. Several entities offer commercial support for the AGPL "Bacula community version" while Bacula Systems3 sells various levels of annual support contracts for "Bacula Enterprise Edition", which contains various non-GPL components developed in-house.

In common with other dual-license software, components developed for the Bacula Enterprise Edition are released into Bacula Community edition after some period of exclusivity to the proprietary version.

Since April 2002, Bacula has over 2 million downloads, which makes it the most downloaded open-source backup program.4

Features

Bacula's features include:

Network options

  • TCP/IP – client–server communication uses standard ports and services instead of RPC for NFS, SMB, etc.; this eases firewall administration and network security
  • CRAM-MD5 – configurable client–server authentication
  • GZIP/LZO – client-side compression to reduce network bandwidth consumption; this runs separate from hardware compression done by the backup device
  • TLS – network communication encryption5
  • MD5/SHA – verify file integrity
  • CRC – verify data block integrity
  • PKI – backup data encryption
  • NDMP – enterprise version plugin6
  • cloud backup with some S3 file storage services

Client OS

The client software, executed by a "file daemon" running on a Bacula client, supports multiple operating systems.7

Considerations

By default, Bacula's differential and incremental backups are based on system time stamps. Consequently, if you move files into an existing directory or move a whole directory into the backup FileSet after a full backup, those files may not be backed up by an incremental save because they may have old dates. You must explicitly update the date/time stamp on all moved files. Bacula versions starting with 3.0 or later support Accurate backup, which is an option that addresses this issue without requiring modification of the files timestamps. This feature should always be used if an accurate state of the filesystem is important. Which criteria should be applied is configurable, i.e. inode comparisons, modification times or md5/sha1 signatures.8

History

Date Event
January 2000 Project started
April 14, 2002 First release to SourceForge.net (version 1.16)
June 29, 2006 Release 1.38.11 (Final version 1 release)
January 2007 Release 2.0.0
September 2007 Release 2.2.3
June 2008 Release 2.4.0
April 2009 Release 3.0.0 with new features8
January 2010 Release 5.0.0 with new features9
September 2010 Release 5.0.3
January 2012 Release 5.2.4 with new features10
February 2012 Release 5.2.6
June 2012 Release 5.2.9
February 2013 Release 5.2.13
July 2014 Release 7.0.5 with many new features11
August 2015 Release 7.2.0 with many new features12
July 2017 Release 9.0.0 with many new features13
December 2018 Release 9.2.0 with many new features14
January 2020 Release 9.4.0 with many new features15
March 2021 Release 11.0.0 with many new features1617
August 2022 Release 13.0.1 with many new features1819
March 2024 Release 15.0.2 with many new features2021

Forks of Bacula

In 2011, Graham Keeling, a "former" Bacula community developer, released a friendly fork of Bacula.22

In February 2013 a former Bacula community developer (with several other Free Software users) released Bareos as a fork of Bacula.23

See also

See also

References

References

  1. "Bacula Community 15.0.2 Released!".
  2. "Bacula Copyright, Trademark, and Licenses". Bacula.org.
  3. "Bacula Systems S.A."
  4. "Bacula". 22 March 2024.
  5. "Bacula TLS – Communications Encryption".
  6. Bacula Enterprise Plugins
  7. "Supported Operating Systems". Bacula.org.
  8. "New Features in 3.0.0". Bacula.org.
  9. "New Features in 5.0.0". Bacula.org.
  10. "New Features in 5.2.0". Bacula.org.
  11. "New Features in 7.0.0". Bacula.org.
  12. "New Features in 7.2.0". Bacula.org.
  13. "New Features in 9.0.0". Bacula.org.
  14. "New Features in 9.2.0". Bacula.org.
  15. "New Features in 9.4.0". Bacula.org.
  16. "New Features in 11.0.0". Bacula.org.
  17. "New Features in 11.0.1". Cloud7 News. 6 February 2021. Archived from the original on 25 November 2021. Retrieved 11 June 2021.
  18. "New Features in 13.0.0". Bacula.org.
  19. "New Features in 13.0.1". Bacula.org. 5 August 2022.
  20. "New Features in 15.0.0". Bacula.org.
  21. "New Features in 15.0.2". Bacula.org. 22 March 2024.
  22. "Burp".
  23. "Bareos".
External links