Author: neilzensoftware

Off-site Backup to a NAS Device Using BackupAssist (Synology Example)

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BackupAssist Synology WebDAV setup

In case you missed the announcement, BackupAssist recently added WebDAV to the suite of backup job types the software is able to support. Intended for those who wish to back up their data to an off-site destination, the protocol enables admins to create encrypted, incremental backups to either a third party hosting company, another Windows server or a NAS device.

The latter is a popular choice, particularly for the smaller business. They’re a good option because once the hardware’s paid for, there’s no monthly recurring charge as you’d tend to expect from a cloud storage provider. Also, the portability of the small units means they can be ‘seeded’ to locally and then moved. In most cases, you have physical access too, which means you’re not relying on an Internet connection for your data in disaster recovery scenarios

In this post, I focus on the steps for configuring one of the more common NAS devices I come into contact with, the Synology. The requirements will be the same for other brands, however, the exact steps and screenshots will of course differ. Continue reading →

BackupAssist 10.3 Introduces WebDav Support – An Rsync Replacement?

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BackupAssist version 10.3

Back in May of last year, there was a veritable buzz in the office as BackupAssist released v10, and with it their shiny new ‘Cloud Backup’ engine, designed at the time to work only with public cloud giants AWS and Azure.

The buzz was partly around the potential for the new technology. Here was a backup engine that could happily back up large files over a WAN, that would encrypt, deduplicate and compress, and that could also be set up with very little effort.

We mentioned then that this was the first iteration and in the newly released 10.3 you’re seeing the next step. In this latest release, the Cloud Backup engine has been expanded to include support for WebDAV destinations, unlocking a wide variety of destinations including Windows machines, NAS devices, and third-party hosting companies.

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Why You Need A Password Manager (like 1Password)

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Alright, so it’s time to log in to that site you’ve not used in a while. 

Username and password? Yep, no problem…

‘Login unsuccessful’

Blast.

….okay, what about B1ngoWozH1sNamo21?

‘Login unsuccessful’

Blast.

It’s a familiar tale in this wonderful digital age in which we live – we’re surrounded by a bottomless pool of amazing websites and services, all climbing over one another to improve our lives, however, every one of the darned things requires a registration.

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Backing Up To Microsoft Azure Using BackupAssist

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It’s been a couple of months since we announced the launch of BackupAssist v10 and its super efficient new cloud backup engine. The significance of the new engine is that it unlocks the possibility of using public cloud giants AWS and Azure as backup destination options.

While the BackupAssist side of things is typically easy to configure, I’ve had a few requests for help navigating Azure’s configuration options, so in this article, I’ll be walking through the steps as they are today.

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5 Essential ‘Tune-up’ Tips for Your MailStore Server

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We love the fact MailStore is such a versatile beast.

It’s able to work with pretty much every mail platform on the market and satisfy the vast majority of requirements users throw at it.

However, if you’ve got a large mail server running multiple jobs, or lots of hosted mail accounts, for example, it’s possible at some point that you could find yourself pushing the limits of your hardware or bandwidth.

Optimising it isn’t difficult and largely boils down to how fast and how often you need your new email added to the archive. The temptation when setting it up for the first time is to opt for the ‘as fast as possible’ approach, when in reality you may be hammering your resources unnecessarily.

In this post, I’ll look at that and provide some simple tips for optimising your MailStore installation around your business needs.

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How to Enable Searching Within Attachments – MailStore Server

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Straight out of the box, when you perform searches of your archived email as a MailStore user, it looks for your keywords in the header, body and subject of your messages. What you may not know, however, is that it also has the ability to search within some attachment types too if you enable the feature.

I’ve found this to be incredibly helpful when looking back over conversations with customers, helping me find invoice or project references for example, and I’m sure you’ll find it useful in your working day too.

Attachment searching is actually enabled by default, but it’s limited to only .txt and .HTML file extensions, so you’re not using its full potential.

In this short post, I’ll show you how to enable the feature and get MailStore to re-index your historic email so it works for that too.

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How To Set Up Email Reporting In MailStore Server

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Set up reporting in MailStore

Last week we let you know about the release of MailStore v10.1, the centrepiece of which was a simple but useful feature we’ve been asked for quite a bit – scheduled email reporting.

You may be thinking, MailStore is German so there won’t be any issues to report on!? Well, not everything about your email is under MailStore’s control, so as an administrator, it’s still nice to see confirmation that your ‘Enten in einer Reihe’ occasionally.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to enable the delightful HTML report email, and let you know how to get the most from it.

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How to Analyse MDaemon Logs Using Microsoft Excel

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A popular feature of MDaemon is its ability to let administrators quickly pinpoint message activity and session information using detailed logs. Sometimes, however, what’s required is more an overview of server usage such as how load is being shared across users or mailboxes for example.

In this post I take a look at how you can use Microsoft Excel to query data you may not even be aware is available in MDaemon!

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How to check if somebody knows your password. Have you been ‘pwned’?

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If you read my post on ‘spear phishing’  you’ll be aware that the hijacking of email accounts is on the rise. These attacks generally revolve around the attacker already knowing the login details for the account somehow.

When I speak to customers they often wonder how the attacker knew their seemingly complex password. Did they simply guess it?

The simple answer is no, in my opinion, that’s very unlikely.

It’s much more likely that the email address and password were used on another site/ service which has led to them being compromised or ‘pwned’.

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Get Better MailStore Email Alerts Using This Powershell Script

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better-mailstore-email-alertsLast year I wrote this article that described how you could use a combination of MailStore email archiver’s auditing features, the Windows task manager and a PowerShell script to send you email alerts in the event an archiving job failed.

This worked well but it was a little on the keen side, occasionally being triggered by a job failing that would actually just go on to run fine again shortly afterwards.

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