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Today we wanted to share our opinion about one of the most interesting computer programs that are offered to us today, this program is known as bacula and is listed as one of the most used programs on the market, it is for this reason that we will dedicate all the present content of this article to publicize the main features and benefits that can be found in this program.

Therefore, we will try to give a fairly objective opinion on the functionality that we can find in this important tool that we must know, and to start from the beginning of the topic, let's first define what Bacula is.

What is Bacula?

Bacula is a software suite designed to help the system administrator manage the backup, recovery and verification of computer data on a network of computers of different types. In addition to assisting in that function, Bacula has the feature that it can be run on a single computer and allows backups to different types of media, among which we can mention tape and disk. If we define this tool in technical language, we can describe it as a network client/server-based backup program. One of the main features that we can find in bacula is that it is relatively easy to use, while at the same time it presents multiple advanced functions to manage the storage, these facilitate the search and recovery of files that have been lost or damaged. Thanks to its modular design, bacula is scalable from small single-computer systems to systems consisting of hundreds of computers in a large network.

Bacula is ideal for providing much more flexible network solutions or catalog services with different functionalities, which allow for faster data backup. However, if the user is not familiar with UNIX systems, or does not have enough experience in compensating with a highly sophisticated backup package, the bacula project is not recommended, as it is a bit more complicated to set up compared to other similar tools such as TAR or DUMP for example. This is because Bacula is designed only to protect data following certain rules, which means "reuse a tape only as a last resort". Of course it is possible to tell bacula to write to any tape in the drive, however it is easier and more efficient to use alternative, simpler programs for this type of operation. On the other hand, if the user needs a backup program that can write to different volumes (that is not limited by the capacity of his tape drive), Bacula will most likely be able to meet his needs.

Some of its main advantages

One of the main advantages that we can find in this tool, is that unlike other commercial packages such as: Legato Networker. ARCserveIT, Arkeia or PerfectBackup+, this one offers many of the functions that we can find in these packages for free, under a GNU software license version 2.

Bacula Composition

- Director Services - Console - Archiving - Storage - Monitor

• Bacula Director It is the program in charge of supervising the different backup, restore, verification and archive operations that are executed by the program. It uses the bacula director system administrator to schedule backups and recover files.

• Bacula Console It is the program that enables the administrator or user to establish a communication with bacula director. Bacula Console is available in 3 versions: : text-based console interface, QT-based interface and a graphical wxWidgets interface. In short, the first version is responsible for running the console program in a shell window (TTY interface), the second version is a GNOME graphical user interface, which has most of the capabilities of the Shell console and finally the third version is a wxWidgets GUI with an interactive file restoration, which also has most of the capabilities found in the Shell console, thus allowing to complete commands with tabulation and provide instant help on the command being typed.

• Bacula file Also known as the "Client Program" is the software that is installed on the machine to perform the backup. This software is specific to the operating system it runs on, and is fully responsible for supplying the file attributes and data that are required by the director, these file services are also in charge of all the file system dependent part of restoring the file attributes and data during a recovery process.

• Bacula Storage These are the software programs that are responsible for carrying out the storage, retrieval of file attributes and data on the physical backup media or volumes. That is, the storage daemon responsible for reading and writing your tapes (or other storage media, e.g. files).

• Bacula Monitor The program that enables the administrator or user to view the status of: Bacula Directors, Bacula File Daemons and Bacula Storage Daemons. (Only a GTK+ version is available), which works with GNOME, KDE or any window manager that supports the FreeDesktop.org system tray standard.

Important about Bacula

Bacula is not a disaster or loss recovery system, therefore we do not recommend using it for this type of situation specifically, although it can certainly be useful if that is what you want to do, however this program has been designed to backup, verify and restore information, For this reason we recommend using it in a preventive way and not as a last minute solution, since the risk of data loss is much lower, renting all the important information to store in a safe and practical way, although if it is necessary to recover information already lost, it is possible to do so by establishing a series of steps that will lead you to achieve this goal. For example, if a user has created an emergency boot disk and/or a Bacula Rescue disk to save the current partition information on their hard drive and maintain a full Bacula backup, it is likely that it will be possible to fully recover that system from scratch.

Conclusion

Nowadays the market offers us different tools to carry out the same process, therefore choosing a specific tool and classifying it as the best is usually not so easy, and this is due to the great variety of products that are offered in the market, products capable of performing wonderful actions in any of the different technological devices that exist nowadays. Therefore, we can conclude that Bacula is not the only tool on the market that can help us in a data backup process, but it is among the most recognized in the community to carry out this important task.