History#
History of Bacularis#
The story of Bacularis begins in 2011, when Marcin Haba started developing a new web-based GUI tool for Bacula called Baculus. Over the next two years, he built a basic web interface for performing administrative tasks in Bacula—such as running backups and restores, managing Bacula media, and working with the web version of bconsole.
You can see this early interface in the video below:
At first, the web GUI was developed privately and never published publicly.
In 2013, Marcin showed the application to Kern Sibbald, the founder of
Bacula. Kern liked the interface and suggested renaming it from Baculus
to Baculum. In March 2014, Baculum officially became part of the
Bacula Project, with its first release shipped alongside Bacula Community
version 7.0.0.
From the Bacula community, Wanderlei Hüttel joined the project, bringing fresh ideas and translating the interface into Brazilian Portuguese. Soon after, Ken Sawada contributed Japanese translations.
In January 2016, Marcin transferred Baculum’s copyright from himself to Kern Sibbald.
A major milestone came in 2017 with version 9.0.0, when a configuration
module was added and Baculum was split into two separate services — API
and Web — allowing both local and remote configuration of Bacula
components. Another milestone followed in 2018 with version 9.2.0, when
the interface layout was redesigned using a CSS framework. The GUI was also
adapted for mobile devices, becoming fully responsive.
The project continued to grow, with Sergey Zhidkov joining as a translator for the Russian language.
In December 2021, Marcin created a friendly fork of Baculum, naming it Bacularis. This marked a new chapter. The goal of Bacularis was to make Bacula easier to use, with simple installation and configuration. Within just six months, Bacularis gained many significant new features, while existing functionality was reworked—starting from the application’s architecture. The aim was to make Bacularis valuable for both experienced Bacula users and newcomers alike.
In 2022, Seungwan Ryu joined the project, translating Bacularis into Korean, followed shortly by Joachim Legrand, who provided French translations.
After another two years of development, Bacularis had grown into a large, advanced application requiring far more attention than it could previously receive. To ensure its continued growth and to focus on it full-time, Marcin decided to establish a dedicated entity to support the project financially. This led to the creation of Bacularis.com, offering services for the free Bacularis platform.
In June 2025, Beata Haba officially joined the project to design and maintain Bacularis themes. In reality, she had been part of the project since the very beginning—creating all the graphics and multimedia materials.
As for what the future holds—time will tell.
We want to thank everyone who has contributed to Baculum and Bacularis over the years—by preparing translations, reporting bugs, sharing ideas, or submitting patches. Your support has been invaluable.