Bareos
Open source network backup and recovery for mixed IT environments with disk, tape, and S3 storage, a web UI, and multi-OS clients.
Bareos (Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced) is a network backup and recovery suite for mixed IT environments, forked from Bacula and maintained by Bareos GmbH & Co. KG. It protects data across Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and macOS clients with a catalog-driven design that tracks every job, file version and storage volume, and it ships a web UI (Bareos WebUI) for administration, browsing and restores.
Where Commvault bundles proprietary agents and subscription licensing, Bareos is AGPLv3 with no open-core restrictions, publishing community packages alongside optional commercial subscriptions. The architecture separates the director, storage daemon and client daemons, so deployments scale from a handful of machines to large estates with backups on disk, tape libraries (including WORM media) or S3-compatible object storage.
Enterprise workflows covered include Always Incremental backup schemes, dedup-friendly storage formats for ZFS/VDO/btrfs, encrypted communication, role-based ACLs and bare-metal recovery with Relax-and-Recover on Linux and Barri disaster recovery on Windows. The same engine extends to VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox and databases through plugins, and NDMP support covers SAN backups.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which platforms does Bareos support?
Clients and daemons run on Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, SUSE), FreeBSD, macOS and Windows. Packages are published for the major distributions, and the source is buildable on other Unix-like systems.
What backup storage targets does Bareos support?
Backups go to disk, tape, tape libraries and autochangers, and S3-compatible object storage. Its storage format is optimized for deduplicating filesystems such as ZFS, VDO and btrfs, with the bdedupestimate tool to size the savings in advance.
Does Bareos have a web interface or API?
Yes. The Bareos WebUI handles administration, job status, browsing and restores with role-based access control. Scripted administration runs through the bconsole command line, and a Python plugin API exists for custom integrations.
Can Bareos back up virtual machines and databases?
Yes. Plugins cover VMware vSphere, Hyper-V and Proxmox, plus database plugins for common engines. NDMP support backs up SAN-attached NAS devices directly.
How does Bareos handle bare-metal recovery?
Linux bare-metal recovery works with Relax-and-Recover integration, and Windows disaster recovery is handled by the Barri tool. Both let you rebuild a full machine image onto new hardware after a failure.
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