Bareos 25, our main release for 2025, is now available. We want to give you an overview of the new features you can expect in this version – from extended hypervisor support to Windows bare-metal recovery and improved automation
We will also present Bareos 25 in detail at the next Bareos Expert Circle on December 4. During the session, we will walk through the new functions, explain technical changes and take a closer look at compliance topics, including NIS2 and the role of supported backup software in regulated environments.
Bareos 25 Plugins and Features
Hyper-V Plugin
Bareos 25 adds native support for Microsoft Hyper-V. The new plugin can back up and restore virtual machines and uses Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) for very fast incremental backups. It supports .vhd and .vhdx disks (local paths only) and is configured directly through the Bareos File Daemon on a Windows Hyper-V host. VM names must be unique. Full and incremental backups are supported and restore recreates the VM and its disks in Hyper-V. A detailed guide will follow in a separate article.
→ Link to documentation
Proxmox Plugin
Another major addition in Bareos 25 is the new Proxmox Plugin, which brings agentless backups for Proxmox Virtual Environment guests. After installing the Bareos File Daemon with the plugin on one cluster node, Bareos can back up both virtual machines and container guests using Proxmox’s native mechanism. At this stage the plugin supports full backups, and restore options are flexible: you can recreate a guest directly on the cluster or restore the data into a local .vma dump file that can then be imported through the Proxmox GUI. This makes the integration straightforward and keeps the workflow aligned with familiar Proxmox tools.
→ Link to documentation
Barri Plugin (Windows Disaster Recovery)
Windows disaster recovery has been one of the most requested features in our community, and with Bareos 25, it is finally here. The new Bareos Recovery Imager (Barri) Plugin introduces a complete toolset for creating and restoring Windows disaster recovery images. Barri can generate a full recovery image of a running Windows system without downtime, either through the Bareos File Daemon plugin or via the standalone barri-cli.exe commandline tool.
The resulting .barri image contains everything needed to bring a Windows system back after a failure. Recovery is flexible: you can restore through a Linux live environment using the Barri plugin, use the Linux or Windows CLI tools, or run the process inside a tailored Windows PE environment when specific drivers are required. Barri supports both connected and fully offline recovery workflows, giving administrators a reliable and modern way to handle Windows disaster recovery in Bareos.
→ Link to documentation
Libcloud Plugin
Bareos 25 re-adds support for backing up cloud objects stored via the S3 protocol through the Apache Libcloud plugin. This allows you to include cloud buckets in your regular Bareos backup workflows. The plugin can automatically recurse nested buckets and back up all objects it finds.
The plugin has been updated to current Python versions and now uses the standard Python threading module. This ensures compatibility and more stable handling of large object sets. For best results, we recommend using gRPC plugin mode, especially when running several Libcloud jobs in parallel.
Note: Restores write objects to a local filesystem rather than restoring them directly to S3.
→ Link to documentation
Qumulo Plugin (Third-Party, by Yuzuy)
Another highlight in this release cycle is the improved integration with Qumulo systems. Many Bareos users rely on Qumulo for large-scale file storage, and the qumulo plugin created by our partner Yuzuy makes it much easier to protect those environments with Bareos.
The plugin connects Qumulo clusters directly to the Bareos File Daemon and supports a wide range of features, including full and incremental backups, snapshot-based backups for consistent file sets, ACL handling, and file and folder exclusions. It also avoids expensive tree walks thanks to its fast scan for changed data, significantly reducing the runtime of backup jobs. Virtual Full backups can also be performed with this plugin.
→ Link to documentation
New Regular Expression Library
Bareos 25 introduces a significant speed improvement for operations that rely on regular expressions (regex). A regular expression is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text and is used in Bareos to match file and directory names.
Bareos allows to use regex both to define what files/directories should be included and what files/directories should be excluded from backups.
Bareos now switched from the old legacy regular expression library to the the faster PCRE2 engine on Windows. Depending on the pattern, performance increased dramatically. Depending on the complexity of the expression, the speedup that can be expected is between 2 and 20 times faster.
Automatic Configuration of Disk Autochanger
Bareos 25 also simplifies working with virtual disk autochangers. When a storage device is configured with a Count value higher than 1, Bareos now creates all required virtual devices automatically and groups them into an autochanger avoiding manual setup.
The first device is created with Autoselect = No, the rest are added to the new autochanger. This makes it easy to scale from a single file device to a multi-device setup and run more jobs in parallel. The only manual step that remains is setting the appropriate Maximum Concurrent Jobs value in the Director.
→ Link to documentation
What these features bring to You
Bareos 25 makes daily backup operations faster, easier and more flexible. The new plugins extend support for major platforms, improve recovery options and reduce technical overhead. Windows systems can now be recovered end-to-end with Barri, Proxmox and Hyper-V integrate more smoothly into existing setups, regex operations run significantly faster and cloud objects can be included in backup workflows again.
Altogether, Bareos 25 helps organizations simplify their backup infrastructure while improving performance and reliability.
Learn More at the Bareos Expert Circle
If you want a deeper look at Bareos 25, join our next Expert Circle on December 4. We will walk through all new features in detail, share technical insights and discuss compliance topics such as NIS2. It’s a good opportunity to ask questions and learn how the new release can support your organisation.
Conclusion
Bareos 25 is a major step forward for users who need reliable, flexible and compliant data protection. With new hypervisor support, Windows disaster recovery, improved regex performance, extended cloud capabilities and easier automation, the release brings practical improvements for many environments.
If you want guidance on deployment, migration or compliance topics, we offer support and consulting services to help you run Bareos with confidence.
And if you need access to our repositories with plugins and previous Bareos versions – you can obtain this through a Bareos subscription.
We also provide evaluation access to Bareos 25 for organisations that are considering a subscription. If you would like to test the new version in your environment, simply fill in the form here: https://www.bareos.com/try/
Bareos 25 is available in our repositories and we look forward to your thoughts.