Data Backup. Bacula Enterprise As A Backup Platform. M365 Backup Capabilities Of Bacula Enterprise.

Data is quickly becoming one of the most important resources for any company, no matter how big or small it is. Losing even a part of your data is a stressful experience, at best, and could be an end to your entire business, at worst. Backup and recovery systems were originally created to prevent the worst from happening in such scenarios.

Every single OS or software can be installed or reinstalled multiple times, but not having a backup system in place means that once you’ve lost even some of your data – it’s gone forever. It’s up to system administrators to set up and maintain backup and recovery systems, making sure that all of the important data is backed up on a regular basis so that no negative event could do permanent damage to your company.

There are many different events and disasters that may cause the loss of your data, either partial or complete.

Some examples of those events are:

• Software failure
• Hardware failure
• Cyberattack
• Physical theft
• Cyber-theft, and more.

Luckily enough, a competent backup and recovery system should be able to minimize the effects of negative events and get you back to work as soon as possible.

While it is heavily recommended to backup everything you have, but with different priority levels, it’s also important to know which files are considered the most important for everyone. There are three main groups of files that should take priority on your list of data to create a backup of:

• Data from your applications and operational systems. Includes calendar entries, contacts, social media information, OS/App settings, emails, and more.
• Media files. While file types such as videos, sounds, and photos tend to take a lot more storage space than the two other file groups, it’s still important to back them up – but it might be much more effective to try and use a different backup strategy when dealing with large amounts of data.
• Documents. The most obvious category out of the three, includes word files, spreadsheets, presentations, and other files that contain sensitive or non-disclosable information about the company, its employees, and so on.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are also several different types of backup appliances that you can choose from – hardware, software, and cloud. Let’s talk about each one of them in a bit more detail.

Hardware appliances for backup most of the time come in rack-mounted devices of variable sizes, and you’re supposed to connect them to your company’s network. The backup process is managed by dedicated software, and the initial startup is relatively easy most of the time. It is worth noting, though, that using a dedicated hardware appliance as your only backup storage source is a road to disaster since you won’t be able to restore the data in question if the only copy of it would be gone, as well.

Another, somewhat more popular type of backup is represented by various software means of creating backups. Usually, software backup appliances allow for a lot more customization when it comes to the backup target storage, as well as other, more unconventional means, like using and/or backing up virtual machines. These solutions are also often cheaper since no physical appliances are needed in the first place, which makes it easier for them to win clients over.

The last participant on the list are cloud backup and recovery solutions, and those are more of a rising trend right now. Multiple service providers tend to offer a backup-as-a-service feature, which allows the client to back up their data to and from the service provider’s cloud storage via specific agents that have to be installed on your computers.

While this type might be the easiest to work with from the first glance, as the least complicated option, it’s also important to know for sure that the cloud storage in question meets various security requirements before sharing your sensitive data with it.

On the topic of different backup solutions, it might be tough to choose the correct solution for your company, even if you’ve decided on the type of solution that suits you the best. In that case, we recommend checking out Bacula Enterprise.

Bacula Enterprise prides itself on the number of features offered, combined with customization and scalability options. Additionally, there are no payments per data volume, or per storage device, which makes it a great deal cost-wise.

Bacula Enterprise is extremely effective in both virtual and physical environments and provides a variety of technologies suitable for many different use cases, including:

• Solutions for both Windows and Linux servers;
• Support of different backup types (Incremental and Differential), as well as Bacula’s own technology – Progressive Virtual Full backup;
• Advanced backup support for container environments (Docker, Openshift, Kubernetes, etc.);
• Global Endpoint Deduplication;
• Extensive backup support for Microsoft 365-related applications, including OneNote, Calendar, Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and so on.
• Continuous Data Protection, and more.

Many other details about Bacula Enterprise and its capabilities are available in our dedicated article about Bacula as an enterprise backup solution. While we’re on the topic of Bacula’s features, we can also go over something more specific than just a feature list.

Let’s take Bacula’s Microsoft 365 support, for example. As with most of Bacula Enterprise’s features, Microsoft 365 support is available via a dedicated module that allows Bacula’s software to offer various backup and recovery capabilities to this specific group of software appliances.

Some of the features that Bacula Enterprise offers to Microsoft 365 users are:

• User-oriented web front-end;
• Deduplication
• Compression
• Incremental and differential backups
• REST API for CSPs (Cloud Service Providers), and more.

The module itself is extremely easy to work with and can be deployed in a short time frame. It covers most of the use cases of a regular Microsoft 365 backup solution and is capable of addressing issues such as accidental data deletion, external security threats, API lock-in, compliance, and other legal issues connected with data trails, internal security issues, or accidents, and so on.