On August 7, 2026, the first beta release of Bacula 17.0.0 was announced on the Bacula mailing lists. According to Eric Bollengier, Bacula Community release manager, the list of changes is extensive and includes hundreds of patches and thousands of new lines of code, many of them backported from Bacula Enterprise.
Among the new features, the new security capabilities for the File Daemon are particularly noteworthy. They make it possible to restrict RunScript execution to specific directories or disable it entirely. It is also possible to restrict restore destinations and limit the locations from which the File Daemon is allowed to back up files.
In Bacula 17.0.0, the CRAM-MD5 authentication mechanism has been replaced by SCRAM-SHA256. This is another security improvement that removes the use of MD5, an algorithm now considered weak. As explained in the release announcement, Bacula network communication is also protected by TLS by default, so the previous use of CRAM-MD5 did not in itself represent a critical security vulnerability.
There is also something new for users who want to protect individual Bacula jobs from having their catalog records removed during pruning. Bconsole now provides a way to control pruning for a specific JobId using the update command.
The default behavior of some access restrictions has also changed. The Console ACL directives DirectoryACL and UserIdACL can now be left unset instead of receiving the *all* value.
Bacula 17.0.0 also introduces a new format for the Bacula catalog database tables, so upgrading from an earlier version includes an update of the catalog table format.
Binary packages for Bacula 17.0.0 have been prepared and made available through the Bacula.org package repositories. Despite this being a beta release, the packages are available in the "release" section. Packages and binaries are available for:
- Red Hat 7, 8, 9 and 10, as well as compatible systems,
- Debian 11, 12 and 13,
- Ubuntu 22, 24 and 26 LTS,
- Windows.
The complete list of changes in Bacula 17.0.0 is available in the release notes:
Bacula 17.0.0 Beta Release Notes
The first beta release of Bacula 17.0.0 is an important step towards the next stable major release of the project. We congratulate and thank all authors, contributors, Bacula Systems, as well as everyone testing Bacula, reporting issues and supporting the development of Bacula Community.
The Bacula News team encourages users with suitable test environments to try Bacula 17.0.0 and report any issues they find. This is one of the simplest ways the community can help with the preparation of the stable Bacula 17 release.