Both EBacula (Enterprise Bacula) and CBacula (Community Bacula) have free backup and catalog recording format. This means that you can easily migrate your backups to another solution any time: there is no technological imprisonment.
The reverse is not true! Enterprise data center backup systems alternatives usually have a proprietary write format, with the sole purpose of keeping the customer dependent on the renewal of the same software, using high renewal budgets and making any migration possibility more costly.
Even so, some strategies can be adopted to facilitate the migration of other tools to Bacula, as follows.
1. Minimum Legacy Restore Environment (Lower Effort)
This strategy is the most convenient for the backup administrator. The new EBacula backup system is installed and customers are gradually migrated to the new solution with backup and restore testing. After all backup clients are migrated, the old backup system is put on standby with minimal access to tape drives or disks required to restore backups that are still retaining the retention time.
After all the retentions of legacy backups expire, you can demobilize the old environment.
2. Restore to Landing Zone and New Backup (Higher Effort)
The administrator creates a storage area at least equal to the largest backup performed by the previous solution. He restores the backup to this area (landing zone) and a new backup is done with Bacula. The attributes of the original backup are configured in Bacula so that it has the same legacy backup characteristics.
Depending on the original legacy tool (e.g., Netbackup), we have a unique Bacula migration software that connects with the previous solution, initiates the restoration work for the landing zone, new backup and realization of the import of the original metadata automatically.
After migration and validation of the new backups, the landing zone and old backup system can be disabled.
* All trademarks are registered and owned by their respective developers.
Disponível em: 
English
