A backup is useful only if you can restore what you need.
Sometimes that means recovering one deleted file. In other cases, you may need to restore a complete virtual machine, a running database or an entire server after a disk failure.
These are very different data recovery tasks, and backup tools are not equally focused on all of them.
So before choosing a backup solution, it helps to ask:
What do you actually need to recover?
File Restore: All Tools Cover the Basics
File recovery is the most basic requirement, and all of the tools in our comparison can handle it.
Bareos and Bacula provide catalog-based file restore. Proxmox Backup Server can browse backups and recover individual files. UrBackup and Duplicati offer restore interfaces, while Restic and BorgBackup restore files from snapshots or archives.
For normal situations such as an accidentally deleted document any of these approaches can work well.
The differences become more important when you need to restore more than files.
Virtual Machines: Restore the Whole Workload
Restoring the complete VM can be much easier than rebuilding it from individual files.
Proxmox Backup Server is built around this model for Proxmox VE. It can back up and restore complete Proxmox virtual machines and LXC containers directly.
Bareos supports VM-level backup and recovery for VMware, Proxmox VE and Hyper-V.
Bacula provides integrations for VMware, Proxmox and Hyper-V through Bacula Enterprise.
UrBackup offers only Hyper-V integration as a commercial component.
Restic, BorgBackup and Duplicati work differently. They can protect files inside a virtual machine, but they are not designed as hypervisor-level VM recovery systems.
That distinction matters if your goal is to quickly restore a complete VM rather than manually rebuild the operating system and application.
Databases Need More Than File Backup
Databases create another recovery challenge.
Simply copying PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQL server data files while the database is running may not produce a consistent backup. Database-aware backups normally use database APIs, transaction logs, snapshots or database-native backup tools.
Bareos provides dedicated integrations for PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB and Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle backups can be created with Oracle’s own RMAN tools and then protected by Bareos.
Bacula also offers dedicated integrations for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, mainly through Bacula Enterprise.
With tools such as Restic, BorgBackup, Duplicati, UrBackup or Proxmox Backup Server, database protection usually depends more on the database itself. You might first create a consistent database snapshot, then back up the resulting data.
Recovering a Complete Linux or Windows System
Bareos supports Linux bare-metal recovery through its integration with Relax-and-Recover (ReaR), which creates a recovery environment and rebuilds the system before Bareos restores the backup data. For Windows, Bareos 25 provides Barri plugin, the Bareos Recovery Imager.
Bacula Enterprise provides its own Linux and Windows bare-metal recovery tools.
UrBackup is particularly interesting for Windows systems. It can create image backups and restore them from bootable recovery media onto an empty disk. Linux image backup and restore is also available, but with more restrictions around filesystems and disk layouts.
Proxmox Backup Server can restore Linux filesystem and block-device backups, but it does not provide a complete physical bare-metal recovery workflow that automatically rebuilds partitions, the boot environment and operating system. Its strongest complete-system recovery remains Proxmox VM and container recovery, which we covered in the previous article.
Restic, BorgBackup and Duplicati are more focused on recovering data than recreating a complete operating system. If a machine fails completely, the usual approach is to reinstall or rebuild the system first and then restore the backed-up files.
Which Recovery Model Fits Your Environment?
There is no single recovery model that is best for everyone.If you mainly protect files, a simple repository-based tool such as Restic or BorgBackup may already provide everything you need.
If most workloads run on Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup Server offers a very direct VM recovery workflow.
If Windows system images are important, UrBackup provides a relatively straightforward option.
And if the environment includes physical servers, databases, VMware, Hyper-V, Proxmox and different operating systems, platforms such as Bareos or Bacula provide more recovery options within one backup environment.
The important question is not only “Can I back this up?”, but “What will I actually have to do when I need to restore it?”