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Archive for June 2nd, 2013

bareos an interesting replacement to bacula

June 2nd, 2013 by

Bareos logo
Dear community, I would like to present and get your feedback about a new project called bareos [1]

I discovered it 6 months ago, after starting to be more and more annoyed by the way the bacula’s community edition was driven and developed. Even if I was using it since version 1.32 … First of all, I wish to be clear and shout out my respect to all the work done by Kern on Bacula or any other contributor. We have a really nice working software. We even have a nice build packages for it on OBS.
But it’s stalled …

My personal frustration started with the creation of Bacula Enterprise, which has until now never (from what I’ve seen) reversed an Enterprise feature back to the community. Which in my sense would have been a clear statement & commitment from the Bacula Enterprise to the community.
A Free Software is free once it has been paid once. And more the time pass, more the community edition look like abandoned (windows client binary, bweb, …) Okay I can understand the enterprise’s edition arguments, the point is not there according to me.

So at the end of last year, I’ve started looking what else could replace Bacula for my own usage, and the small/medium customers I serve. Digging on github (my favorite source forge) I discovered bareos project. Basically Bareos is a fork of bacula community edition. With active contribution, and look like what I was looking for. Bareos is a compatible (at the time of writing) drop’in replacement which offers a bunch of nice feature I was waiting for. Especially high quality windows clients. The whole being cooked on a private obs instances, tested with jenkins, travis …

Okay I was disappointed about the fact it was a fork, but their website explains the why for those who wish to know.

I’ve then started to use it (easy to try with the number of supported platforms) and ready to use package. (Thanks to open build service [2]) Some installations were kept in a compatible way, other in native bareos way. The transition was really easy for anybody knowing how bacula works. After 3 months of production, including full restore, virtual machine backup, etc, I qualified it to be really production ready. Hey the base code and the way patches have been handled certainly explain those results. I also appreciate the effort to make bareos almost ready to use after installation. Trying to reduce the entry level ticket.

The remaining concerns I’ve found:
– The community behind will have to grow and success in a truly transparent way.
– Get new contributors (challenge is the same for bacula, but forking and propose request merge on github is really more cool than email patches)
– The full remake of the documentation (work in progress)
– Get a perfect web bconsole
My best hope:
– Make sustainable, the business plan associated with bareos.com and thus continue to produce quality community software

So did some of you already test it?
What’s your own feedback, your thoughts about it?

Regards.
[1] http://www.bareos.org
[2] http://openbuildservice.org