It is designed to automate backup tasks that had often required intervention from a systems administrator or computer operator.

Administrators and operators can configure the system via a command line, GUI or web interface; its back-end is a catalog of information stored by MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite.

Bacula is open-source and released under the AGPL version 3 license with exceptions to permit linking with OpenSSL and distributing Windows binaries.

[7] By default, Bacula's differential and incremental backups are based on system time stamps.

Bacula versions starting with 3.0 or later support Accurate backup, which is an option that addresses this issue without requiring modification of the files timestamps.