Bacula Systems Information
Document
Making the Switch: How to Know if You
Are Ready to Move Up to Bacula Enterprise
Using Bacula Enterprise
This white paper explores the differences between Bacula’s Community and Enter-
prise versions, to help readers decide which is the right choice for them.
Version 1.0, May 12, 2023
Copyright ©2008-2023, Bacula Systems S.A.
All rights reserved.
1 Bacula Community and Bacula Enterprise – What
are they?
1.1 What is Bacula Community?
Bacula is a set of completely open source computer programs that permits the
system administrator to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer
data across a network of computers of different kinds. Bacula can also run entirely
upon a single computer and can backup to various types of media, including tape
and disk.
In technical terms, it is a network Client/Server based backup program. Bacula is
relatively easy to use and efficient, while offering many advanced storage manage-
ment features that make it easy to find and recover lost or damaged files. Due
to its modular design, Bacula is scalable from small single computer systems to
systems consisting of hundreds of computers located over a large network. Bacula
Community is fully open source.
1.2 What is Bacula Enterprise?
Bacula Enterprise, like its Community sister, is an especially highly secure, highly
scalable networked backup and recovery software solution who’s core engine is made
of exactly the same code as the Community version. Just as Community version
can, the Enterprise version provides the backup and restore capability from a few
tens to many thousands of machines – however with a much broader and deeper
technology compatibility fit - whether virtual, physical, containerized, cloud based
on-prem or off-prem, or any hybrid or cloud native combination. Complemented
with some 23 plugins, it covers the widest range of IT environments of practically
any backup and recovery solution in the world, including support for 32 operating
systems, multiple applications, hypervisors, SaaS applications and databases. Noted
for its especially high levels of security and flexibility, it is relied on by some of
the most security conscious organizations in the world.
1.3 Checklist of criteria For Moving to Bacula Enterprise
Here is a non-exhaustive list of main factors which signal that you are probably
ready to switch from Community to Enterprise:
1 You need fast, responsive professional technical support from senior engineers
2 You need access to the Bacula range of plugins and modules to perform faster
implementation, natively integrated backup and recovery of Hypervisors, SaaS
applications and databases
3 You need access to a comprehensive graphical User Interface for Bacula
4 You need to heighten security levels over community version and other backup
vendors, using Bacula’s additional security technologies
5 You need Deduplication or Communication line compression
6 You need test and certification of your implementation
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7 You need faster performance of the Catalogue
8 You need Linux and/or Windows Bare Metal Recovery
A Bacula Enterprise Subscription includes both Bacula Enterprise software and sup-
port services.
2 Differences in Community and Enterprise versions
The table below lists key differences between Community and Enterprise versions.
Overview Community Enterprise
Leading Network Backup & Restore solution
Trial Kickstart
Free code
Patches
Support
Certified binaries
Certification & Test
Support & Services Community Enterprise
Bacula Certified Trainings
Consulting from Bacula Systems & Certified Partners
Community Online forums
Professional Technical Support
Remote assistance for installation, configuration, de-
sign, troubleshooting, optimization and audit
Access to Professional Documentation
24/7 Technical Support option
Immediate Access to fully tested Bacula fixes
Roadmap Visibility & Influence
Managed release cycles
Entitlement to new features & upgrades
Advanced Features Community Enterprise
Snapshot technology
Snapshot management
Single file restore for VMware
Microsoft 365
Google Workspace
Single mailbox recovery for Exchange
Client initiated backup
Windows SD
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Windows EFS support
Storage device switchover
Restart failed job
Communication line statistics
Catalog performance improvement
Periodic statistics for running jobs in Director
Truncate command
SD to SD replication
SD to SD replication with Deduplication
Communication Line Compression
Read-only drive directive
Catalog schema for high performance
Global Endpoint Deduplication
Aligned Volume Format
Continuous Data Protection
Client Behind NAT
Modules (plugins) for native integration with Community Enterprise
specific technologies
LDAP and Active Directory
VMware
Red Hat Virtualization
KVM
Hyper-V
Single file restore for Hyper-V
Xen
Single file restore for Xen
Proxmox
Nutanix
Nutanix Filer
Azure VM
S3 Objects
S3 Storage Tiers Control
Docker
Kubernetes
RedHat OpenShift
Plugin for SAP
Windows VSS
Windows Bare Metal Recovery
Linux Bare Metal Recovery
NDMP Plugin
Incremental Accelerator for Netapp plugin
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Oracle plugin with SBT
PostgreSQL plugin
MySQL Percona plugin
SAP HANA plugin
SAP (Sybase) ASE plugin
Plugin for MSSQL Server
Delta plugin
San Shared Storage plugin
Azure Cloud Plugin
AWS Cloud Plugin
Google Cloud Plugin
Oracle Cloud Plugin
Glacier Cloud Plugin
Tools Community Enterprise
Bacula Administrative Tool Limited
BWeb Management Suite
BCloud Service
BWeb plugin restore options
REST API
In addition to the above additional features, Bacula Enterprise includes support
delivered by senior Bacula Enterprise engineers. The Bacula Enterprise subscription
includes software, license rights, patches, updates, upgrades and unlimited technical
support. No data volume or other charges.
3 User Scenarios of Community Version
3.1 Cost Reduction by Moving Away From Legacy Vendor
An organization needed a find a backup solution with a much flatter cost/licens-
ing structure in order to find the value it needed to economically back up large
amounts of data. It also needed to reduce the risk of being “held to ransom” by the
backup vendor over future data volume growth – and along with this, the ability
to accurately predict licensing costs to at least five years into the future. At the
same time, it needed very high security in its data backup controls, and a high level
of scalability to readily manage its two Petabytes of data and an average file size
of 600 Gigabytes. Storage-related controls and compatibility were critical too; the
backup solution needed to be able to do restores to a SAN in the correct order and
at the correct speed.
Bacula Community was readily able to meet this users needs, and so was adopted
for use by this organization. This use case is especially remarkable in that such a
high performance and highly scalable requirement use case in a mission-critical pro-
fessional environment was met using completely free software from Bacula. Clearly,
predicting licensing costs to at least five years into the future was not difficult!
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3.2 Achieving Scalability by Moving Away From A Legacy Ven-
dor
An organization with over 800 servers needed a find a backup solution that remained
robust and stable in a large scale-out environment. Most other commercial vendors
became unreliable or even outright unstable in environments with over 500 servers
that needed backing up from a centralized backup system. They also typically placed
too much load on the network during backup operations. The situation became
even more complicated due to the many different versions of Linux that were in use
among the many servers, as many these Linux versions were not supported by the
commercial vendors.
Bacula Community was a perfect fit for this environment. It copes with the operat-
ing system diversity throughout the IT environment, and performs with outstanding
reliability and stability for this relatively high number of servers. It also provides
the control features and code efficiency to place minimum load on the network,
achieving successful completion of all jobs within the allotted backup window.
3.3 Small Cloud BaaS Business Protecting VMware Hypervi-
sors
A small business needed to backup 20 VMware virtual machines, using snapshots.
This small organization consisted of some IT engineers that knew Linux well, and
were motivated to build Bacula out to support and protect its thriving BaaS business.
Bacula Community was used to protect each virtual machine, by placing a Bacula
File Daemon inside each virtual machine. Bacula’s ability to support specialized
scripts to meet specific business usage was also exploited.
3.4 University Using Bacula Community in a HPC Environ-
ment
A large university with national importance as a High Performance Computing Cen-
ter, including a nationally-ranked supercomputer uses Bacula Community to protect
its HPC environment, where very big files - and in other cases - millions of files - are
backed up. Bacula Community was chosen over other commercial vendors not only
because of the cost savings, but also because it was Open Source. In addition, its
ability to operate in a limited backup window, where efficient network bandwidth
is needed. In this university’s HPC environment, there are six very large (physical)
servers, and 12 VMs where it was perfectly manageable to place a file agent on each
VM. Additionally, Bacula Community is used to backup to both disk and tape.
3.5 Government Organization With An Open Source Use Pol-
icy
A European National Government administration organization have an ongoing pol-
icy to use open source wherever possible - in order to keep costs down and minimize
the possibility of vendor lock-in. For its backup and recovery software needs, there
were only two open source solutions available worldwide, and only one offered the
capability to backup physical and virtual machines to disk, tape and cloud – Bacula
Community.
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This government organization chose Bacula Community and in doing so, have elim-
inated vendor lock-in in that part of its department, as well as exceeding its security
level requirements.
4 User Scenarios of Bacula Enterprise Version
4.1 Fastest Recovery of Very Large Database(s)
One of the very largest global online travel agencies specifically chose Bacula be-
cause of its ability to restore its (especially big) MySQL database in the shortest
amount of time. In addition, it needed to be able to back up the database with-
out suffering downtime. Super-fast application and data backup and restore was
critical to this organization because any downtime to its central booking database
can be measured in the loss of thousands of dollars-per-second. Similarly, the com-
pany needed extremely high levels of security; being breached by ransomware was
completely unacceptable. The combination of these exacting requirements in such
an extremely mission-critical environment was a requirement that almost no other
backup and recovery vendor could meet.
In order to make this specific and demanding requirement work, Bacula’s qualities
of highest security, scalability and specialist MySQL integration with its plugins and
tools were utilized in order for the organization to meet its especially demanding
security, RTO and RPO requirements.
4.2 Container Persistent Data and Configuration Protection
An organization with Kubernetes in production needed a comprehensive strategy for
restoring and upgrading clusters. In the case that a cluster goes into an unrecover-
able state, backup of the config file and its persistent volumes is required to revert
back to the previous stable state of the Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes cluster-level
backups give the organization’s DevOps team the tools to back up and restore their
entire Kubernetes clusters (automatically) and restore them with a single action to
a known good state to minimize production interruption.
Bacula was used by this customer to restore single Kubernetes configuration re-
sources. For this organization, Bacula Enterprise’s Kubernetes module backs up
a number of Kubernetes resources, including: Deployments, Pods, Services, and
Persistent Volume Claims. It also backs up and recovers persistent data; restores
Kubernetes resource configurations to local directories, backs up and restores persis-
tent volumes, and restores Kubernetes persistent volumes data to local directories.
4.3 Hybrid Cloud Combined with Off-Premise Backup Strat-
egy
An organization needed to combine the control of an on-premises data center and
private cloud with the scalability and reduced costs of the public cloud. The aim
was to place each workload in its optimal environment to promote high performance
and reduce total costs. Bacula was chosen because it has the technology fit com-
bined with the Cloud control tools to optimize and balance workloads as needed.
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For example, Bacula’s native integration to Amazon S3, Azure, Google Cloud, Or-
acle Cloud and Glacier provided the necessary options for the organization to feel
unconstrained. It also provided the in-cloud features such as S3 Objects backup
and recovery; Azure, Google Storage and S3 tiers support, S3 storage tier control
and Azure VM support.
This organization directly benefited from Bacula’s ability to manage network band-
width when transferring backup data into Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and
Amazon S3 cloud. This ensures that its backups to cloud do not monopolize its
network. Similarly, concurrent asynchronous upload and download of backup data,
and multiple bucket support in a single storage daemon also contribute positively,
including the means to configure each bucket to suit the user’s personal needs.
4.4 Company Growth Resulting in Significantly Increased Num-
ber of Hypervisors
A company had increased its use of Virtual Machine numbers so much, the burden
in terms of time needed for implementation and/or upgrades had reached the point
where it was becoming unmanageable. The company’s growth had also led to need-
ing far more advanced policy-based management, to help administrators maintain
greater control of backup and recovery operations with a lower time investment.
This organization primarily chose Bacula Enterprise for its added security qualities,
which other leading backup vendors that specialized in Hypervisor backup could
not compete with. However, application consistency was another deciding factor,
being far easier to maintain: Bacula Enterprise’s agentless snapshot technology
makes a complete copy of a virtualized server or VM at a specific point in time.
This snapshot capability allows this organization’s applications to continue running
without loss of data, ensuring the application consistency that is critical to business
continuity.
The cost of purchasing a Bacula Subscription was significantly mitigated by taking
advantage of Bacula Enterprise’s agentless backup. Without an individual agent
on every VM in the network, administrators were able to focus on other cost-
saving exercises, had less communications to run, and lower CPU and bandwidth
consumption. In addition to easier IT administration, the company was free to
continue its growth, with no further time restrictions, nor worries about data volume
since Bacula has no capacity-based licensing.
4.5 An Organization that Needed Fast-Reaction Support Ser-
vices
One large organization in the finance industry using Bacula Community had grown
to the point that it simply became necessary to use Bacula’s subscription in order
to make sure its backup systems were configured and optimized according to best
practices. “We had managed for several years using Bacula unsupported” said the
company’s IT Director. “But when we moved to Bacula’s subscription, with its paid
support included, the Bacula team were able to streamline our deployment, and even
spot problems that we did not even know we had”. The IT Director added: “Bacula
Systems not only gave us great, outstanding support during the proof of concept
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stage, but continued with the same high level of expert support right through the
deployment phase – and it still continues today ”
5 Cost Comparison: Community and Enterprise
Bacula Community is fully open source, and available for download at no cost.
If chosen for corporate use, the community version may require internal resources
to manage release cycles, test, support and add advanced capabilities to the base
functionality available in this version. An enterprise using free, open source code
typically tends to find there are some direct or indirect costs associated with it, in
order to have a successful deployment.
6 Risk Levels of Using Community Compared to En-
terprise
6.1 Security Levels
Both Bacula Community and Enterprise versions are inherently very secure, com-
pared to other backup solutions in general. This is because of its modular architec-
ture, where its different components do not need, nor allow two way communication
between its individual elements. This removes in one stroke the fundamental se-
curity vulnerabilities that most of its competitors suffer from. Bacula’s exceptional
security qualities are multiplied exponentially by the simple fact that although Bac-
ula can protect practically any data from any operating system, its core engine runs
on Linux. Finally, Bacula’s file agents have no executable permission on the other
elements of the other Bacula components. It is especially important that a backup
solution offers the option to run the client/agent in read-only mode, and that the
solutions supports tape encryption in case it is needed at some point. Bacula consid-
ers these types of options as basic level cyber-resiliency qualities, yet many backup
solutions cannot offer this.
Another important consideration for organizations that demand the very highest
security is that Bacula’s code is open source. With closed source software and
services, all the trust is focused on a single entity, and most vendors do not provide
any insight into the building blocks used that are not under their own full control.
Back doors often exist to secretly harvest information from backup solution users
without their knowledge or consent. With complex software programs, any user has
to trust a great number of people involved in providing the software. Conversely,
Bacula’s open source core code has been hardened and checked by over 4 million
downloads in the Bacula Community, and the code is available for anyone to look
at.
Together with a large range of encryption techniques for communication and data at
rest, support for data immutability, antivirus and security dedicated modules, data
verify capabilities, automated multi-tier to any kind of secure storage or a wide
range of monitoring and reporting capabilities, the overall security levels of Bacula’s
backup solution exceeds that of it competitors. Many of them, with their traditional
‘two-way’ architectures, bi-directional communications at all levels or data transfers
built upon REST APIs, cannot usually compete with these levels of security.
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6.2 Bacula Enterprise’s Additionally High Security Levels
Together with a large range of encryption techniques for communication and data
at rest, support for data immutability, antivirus and security dedicated modules,
data verify capabilities, automated multi-tier to any kind of secure storage or a
wide range of monitoring and reporting capabilities, the overall security level of the
backup solution is exceeding our competitors. Many of them, with their traditional
‘two-way’ architectures, bi-directional communications at all levels or data transfers
built upon REST APIs, cannot usually compete with these levels of security.
Bacula Enterprise offers restricted file agent paths, restricted RunScript directives,
restricted UID per Director, automated system checks, volumes protection (both im-
mutable and Append only), immutable Amazon cloud, Multi-factor Authentication
(MFA), an Antivirus plugin, Communications encryption, encryption at file agent
level, LDAP access controls, FIPS 140 conformity and many more specialist security
features.
7 To-do List, and other Considerations when Switch-
ing from Community to Enterprise
The following is an Upgrade Process Overview for Switching from Community to
Enterprise versions.
Bacula recommends that Community users consider a proof of concept (POC) pe-
riod if any Enterprise functionalities, features, or plugins need to be used. Contact
Bacula to be fast-tracked for a POC with the modules and plugins that are needed.
7.1 Technical Upgrade Details
Bacula Enterprise uses a new catalog format, and Bacula provides a set of scripts
that convert earlier Catalog versions to the new 14.0.0 format. You can utilize
these scripts, provided by the Bacula Support Team, in order to perform the manual
Catalog upgrade process as described in Section 7.2 on the following page. You will
need to save a copy of your existing database before upgrading.
Bacula Systems Support can assist if you have questions or need detailed guidance
prior to or during the upgrade process.
In the case where the manual Catalog upgrade is not dome prior to the installation
of the Bacula upgrade binaries, the upgrade process is carried out automatically.
As a first step of the automatic Catalog upgrade process, a dump of the Catalog
database will be created. Once the automatic upgrade process is complete, the
database backup file is not deleted automatically.
Generally, Bacula recommends the automatic Catalog upgrade approach. However,
in scenarios where the size of the Catalog database is relatively large and/or that
there is not enough free space on the partition that holds the /opt/bacula/working
directory, Bacula recommends doing manual Catalog upgrade process or stopping
the Catalog service prior to the upgrade. The 1025 Catalog format is a quick and
simple schema upgrade.
In Brief — The General Bacula Upgrade Process:
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1 Stop any current version of Bacula from running.
2 To skip the automatic Catalog upgrade, stop the Catalog service.
3 Install the latest version of Bacula Enterprise. If you have not performed the
manual Catalog upgrade, the install will upgrade your database automatically.
4 If you have stopped the Catalog service, restart it and run the tool provided
by Bacula Systems
5 Start the new Bacula daemons. If everything works correctly, no error mes-
sages should be printed.
7.2 Catalog Upgrade
You should backup your Bacula catalog database before making any changes to it.
To do so, you can use the tool provided with Bacula Systems. Keeping the SQL
result file on your local disk can speed up the rollback if required.
8 Conclusion
Conclusion Bacula Community is remarkably comprehensive in features and ca-
pable even when in the context of high-end, heavy duty enterprise use. Bacula
Community’s scalability, robustness and inherent backup and recovery qualities are
unmatchable as an open source solution. To illustrate the power of this solution,
some examples of these built-in tools and functionalities are listed here:
◾ Automatic Communications Encryption (TLS)
◾ Kubernetes Plugin
◾ Support for Cloud Storage
◾ External LDAP Console Authentication
◾ Docker Plugin
◾ Verify Volume Data
◾ Multi-tier backup with Migration and Copy jobs
◾ Incremental, Differential and Synthetic Backup (VirtualFull jobs)
◾ Compression
◾ Microsoft Exchange Server Plugin
Bacula Community’s qualities become even more special when one considers that
it is available at no cost whatsoever.
The reality is however, that many enterprise users, organizations and businesses
need very responsive, reliable support as well as better or deeper integration with
their IT environments in order to meet policy requirements, compliance, security,
business continuity and performance related needs. These organisations need to be
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Figure 1: Bacula Enterprise has especially high security levels and a remarkably
wide range of features, enabling you to efficiently cover your entire IT environment
from a single platform.
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in front of others in terms of their technology use in order to be competitive in their
business. Bacula Enterprise meets these professional needs and takes them beyond
the capabilities of their competitors.
Because Bacula Enterprise subscriptions do not follow a capacity-based licensing
model, its costs are typically very low, and can even be the same or lower than
the costs incurred by an organization finding other resources to develop and service
its Community deployment. As a result, many organizations have opted to rely
on Bacula Enterprise, including some of the largest, most security-orientated and
mission-critical organizations in the world.
Contact
.......... Bacula Systems now to find out whether Community or Enterprise best
1
fits your requirements.
1 https://www.baculasystems.com/contactus/
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