The need for backup on campus is very high, especially since department-wide backup service is a non-trivial service for many departments to implement.

Because of the need for a backup system, the Computer Science department has implemented the Free/Open-Source backup system called Bacula. The Bacula system has an impressive feature set and is very flexible for backups across multiple platforms. The current Bacula system doesn't support

• Ubuntu 16.04
• Windows 10

Bacula can make backups of the files on your system on a regular basis. These backups can allow you to recover files should be become corrupted or missing due to a critical system failure. Note that due to various circumstances, some files/folders are excluded from being backed up.

Bacula is not a file versioning or management system. It cannot stop you from making changes to files you don't want to make, or accidentally deleting files. Even with a backup system in place, caution should still be exercised when working with important and critical files.

Bacula also cannot make you toast in the morning.

This is the boring part that every user needs to read at least once so that everyone is on the same page about how the system works and why a file deleted 2 years ago cannot be retrieved.

Bacula utilizes a client-server architecture in which the backup server requests that a given client perform a backup. The client then determines which files to back up and those are sent to the server. The server happily stores and manages these files.

A full backup will be performed and then incremental backups will occur on a daily basis. Periodically the backup server will consolidate many of your backups into a new Full backup. This is described in detail below.

Files are encrypted on the client before being sent to the server. This ensures that anyone that may be intercepting the communication cannot read the files. This also ensures that (should the backup server be compromised) no files could be read by anyone who physically obtains the hard drives. The encryption keys are generated when the client installer is requested from the CS Dept Bacula download page. These keys are then placed on your hard drive when the client is installed. For someone to obtain your data through the backup system they would need to obtain these keys first, meaning an attacker would already have the data as it would be on the hard drive to begin with.

By default, your C:/ drive is backed up with some exceptions. If you would like other drives backed up you MUST contact the backup administrator with a request to add more drives.