Nobody ever got famous writing backup software, yet backups form one of the fundamental basics of system administraction. There are many solutions to this simple problem:

• do nothing
• ad hoc solutions
• open source packages
• commercial packages

Not only is it important to backup data securely and reliably, you need to be able to restore the data. You need to know what was backed up, from what system, when, and where is that backup now.

In the past few years, Bacula has been gaining ground on more established solutions, both open source and proprietary. This talk will introduce you to Bacula, show you the main components, give you an outline of how it works, and illustrate why Bacula is becoming so widespread.