Today, when best practices for backup and recovery are more important than ever before, it's good to know that high-end fully open source enterprise backup solutions exist for even the largest organizations. Perhaps the most powerful open source solution in its class is Bacula, a highly scalable software for backup, recovery, and data verification. It is a mature yet still significantly developing project used by MSPs, defense organizations, ISVs, and e-commerce companies worldwide and runs on many different Linux flavors. Bacula has a thriving community, and many Linux enthusiasts use it to provide a strong level of data protection.
With the many severe disruptions that ransomware causes today, it's critical that the client system being backed up is never aware of storage targets and has no credentials for accessing them. This is true in Bacula's case, and in addition:
- Storage and Storage Deamon hosts are dedicated systems, strictly secured, allowing only Bacula-related traffic and admin access and nothing else.
- Bacula's "Director" (core management module) is a dedicated system with the same restrictive access.
Bacula has plenty of additional configuration options to tune backups to user needs. It functions in networks and can back up both remote and local hosts. For first-time users, it can look complex, but fortunately, the Bacula Project also provides the Baculum web interface to ease administration. Many Linux users are more than happy to rely on Bacula's command-line interface to exploit its considerable range of capabilities, but sometimes it's good to have an effective GUI, too. That's where the open source Baculum comes