07 Apr BackupAssist Classic Version 15.0.2 has been released

BackupAssist Classic Version 15.0.2 has been released and adds multiple new features and fixes. Download Version 15.0.2 here

This is an important maintenance release for users running Cloud Backups on version 15.0.0 and 15.0.1, including fixes to keep data usage in cloud buckets/containers as low as possible.

Important: we highly recommend enabling the automatic rate limiting functionality in your cloud jobs if you haven’t already done so. You can enable this by setting the “Maximum number of requests per second” to 300 for both GET and PUT in the “Cloud options” tab. This feature will make backups more resilient and speed them up as well, by smoothing out the requests and avoiding throttling issues from the provider.

Cloud Backup – cleanup step

• Garbage collection (deletion of unused data chunks from the container) has been completely reworked with fixes and major performance improvements, especially for immutable backups.
• Major fix to avoid a bug where large data deletions/changes could cause garbage collection to stop working on an ongoing basis, increasing the storage requirements in the cloud provider.
• The “Perform cleanup” step of the backup where garbage collection happens is now limited to run for no more than one quarter of the backup length for large backup jobs.
• Users can skip out of “Perform cleanup” if there is a need to run other jobs, or to reboot the machine for maintenance.
• NOTE: if your job was affected by the garbage collection bug above, the first few backups may run a longer cleanup step than usual, in order to remove extraneous unused data from the backup container.

Cloud Backup – performance

• The performance of Cloud Backups to S3-compatible destinations hosted on relatively low-powered hardware has been improved dramatically (eg. QNAP QuObjects)
  • Note that our Cloud Immutability feature has not yet been confirmed as supported on NAS-device-hosted S3-compatible systems.
• The performance of immutable backups has also been further improved, and immutable backups no longer create the additional short-lived object chunks that were introduced in 15.0.1

Discovery and recovery – all backups

• A discovered catalog for any backup type will now retain the discover-from location (and access details) as the default for the respective backup.
  • This is a change from previous Classic versions where after discovering a backup catalog from a new location, the discovered catalog would still use the original location as the default.
• Importantly, this change allows recovery from Cloud Backups in all cases where the access keys or container names have changed, eg. if the container has been copied.
  • Note that the backups must be rediscovered to take advantage of the fix.
  • Also note that recovery from replicated containers for immutable backups is not yet implemented.
• Restore and recovery is now supported for Wasabi Covert Copy Buckets.

The full release notes which include more information about other fixes and improvements are available here