Bacula

Overview
Bacula is a set of computer programs that permit you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. It has a very large documentation on the Internet - a good one is the "Baculapedia" Project - colaborative documentation for Bacula.

About
Bacula is a scalable backup solution with a modular design. It can run on one system or many systems on a network as it has 3 core components, Director, Storage and Client. In basic terms, it is a Client/Server based backup program. Bacula makes administration easy to backup and restore lost or corrupted files on any given system. It supports tape drives, autochangers and disk based backups along with a catalog driven by a backend database, which can be MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite.

Bacula however is not a full fledged disaster recovery program. It backs up data, stores it with the retention policy you give it and can recover files in case of corruption, lost or deleted, etc. With careful planning though, any disaster recovery plan can be implemented with Bacula.

License
Bacula is mostly released under the GPL v2 License. Some parts contributed are also under the BSD License. Check their Bacula License page for more details. This also covers their Trademark details on the name Bacula.

Requirements
Bacula has been proven to run on Linux, BSD and Solaris systems. It also has support for Windows clients.

Bacula requires the following:


 * GNU C++ version 2.95 or higher
 * MySQL 4.1
 * PostgreSQL 7.4
 * SQLite 2.8.16 or SQLite 3
 * POSIX compatible for porting

If you want to enable DVD writing for backups, you'll need the dvd+rw-tools package. Also Bacula now has a GUI program for administration for those that desire such things called BAT (Bacula Administration Tool). QT4 and KDE are required.

Current Files
You can get the latest release of Bacula which includes the source packages, RPM's and other binary compatible packages at Sourceforge.net.

Links

 * list of backUp applications
 * Project homepage (www.bacula.org)
 * Brief Tutorial (www.bacula.org)
 * HTML Manual (www.bacula.org)