Why Bareos forked from Bacula?

There are lots of reasons actually.

The situation between Bareos and Bacula is very similar to the situation of Nextcloud and OwnCloud. Bacula have open source free Community version and Enterprise paid version. In 2012 then Bacula Enterprise version was still open source but since 2012 its not. Some features from free Community version has been CUT/MOVED into Bacula Enterprise version only. People sent patches for Bacula Community edition but they were not merged for YEARS, so some developers got sick a tired of that situation and they created a fork named Bareos. All these reasons are described in details here: https://www.bareos.org/en/faq/why_fork.html

Currently Bareos has better web interface Bareos Webui – https://www.bareos.org/en/bareos-webui.html – which allows You to make RESTORE from any client to any client on that web interface. Bareos Webui also provides direct console to Bareos Server so You do not have to login using SSH separately. Bacula Web – http://www.bacula-web.org/home.html – on the other side provides monitoring read only capabilities, so You still have to use bconsole directly with Bacula.

What currently is implemented in Bareos is described here:
http://doc.bareos.org/master/html/bareos-manual-main-reference.html#WhatIsImplemented

Bareos has also grown features that are not available on Bacula, like storing backups on S3 object storage. You do not have to store backups in any public cloud directly, You may for example setup your own highly available distributed S3 storage on FreeBSD using Minio: https://docs.minio.io/docs/distributed-minio-quickstart-guide

Bareos also tries to  bring some consistency and order to the configuration files:

# find /usr/local/etc/bareos -type d
/usr/local/etc/bareos
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bconsole.d
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/messages
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/client
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/catalog
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/director
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/pool
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/jobdefs
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/job
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/schedule
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/counter
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/console
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/storage
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/profile
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/fileset
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-fd.d
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-fd.d/client
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-fd.d/director
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-fd.d/messages
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-sd.d
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-sd.d/storage
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-sd.d/ndmp
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-sd.d/director
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-sd.d/autochanger
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-sd.d/device
/usr/local/etc/bareos/bareos-sd.d/messages

While Bacula model is split between pay and have everything in Bacula Enterprise or get free crippled Bacula Community the Bareos model is that You get EVERYTHING for free and you can buy subscription or integration/training services. With Bacula its also not possible to use it after Your subscription ends, its like with Oracle Solaris, You have to pay always just to use it, with Red Hat Linux You can buy the subscription once, and as it ends You can still use that Red Hat Linux system as long as You like, with Oracle Solaris or Bacula Enterprise You have to always pay.

Similar situation was between Nextcloud and OwnCloud. There was paid Enterprise OwnCloud version and crippled Community version of OwnCloud, some developers got sick an tired, some even left the OwnCloud company, even the creator or OwnCloud. They started Nextcloud with same model as Bareos, You get EVERYTHING for free and you can optionally buy subscription or integration/training services.

… and one more thing, You can actually get support/subscription for Bareos Server on FreeBSD from Bareos team. Its a custom contract currently, not listed on their site, but if You contact them they can provide that support for FreeBSD. Not possible with Bacula even with Bacula Enterprise version.

Bacula is dead, long live Bareos!

OwnCloud is dead, long live Nextcloud!

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