22 May

For a long time now I've been experimenting with different hardware and software solutions, looking for an all purpose storage server I could use both at home and in the office. At home I've basically just been after a centralised store for my photos, movies and documents with a level of integration that would also allow me to stream content to various different devices. In the office we need a bit more, so support for technologies such as Rsync, SSH, iSCSI, RAID drives and NFS have all been on my wish list.
16:00 / BackupAssist
08 May

Just a quick update to let you know about a great little free utility I've stumbled upon that you might find handy if you're a user of BackupAssist. I've recently been testing BackupAssist with iSCSI target destinations and have been using the iSCSI target built into Microsoft Server 2008 R2. This works great but unfortunately is only available for 2008 servers.
16:44 / BackupAssist
04 Apr

Zen Software at Infosec We're but a few weeks away from the annual industry pilgrimage to Earls Court for the biggest of the IT and security shows in this country, InfoSecurity Europe. Each year IT professionals (and the not-so) gather at InfoSec to take in keynote talks from industry experts, strengthen relationships with customers and suppliers, keep an eye on the competition and of course, pick up plenty of promotional tat for the kids. This year will be slightly different however, as visitors will notice that the show's noticeably better than previous ones thanks to the addition of the Zen Software stand in the new exhibitor area. It's possible I'm overestimating the impact we'll have but in any case, we're genuinely pleased to be a part of the show and that we'll be down there unashamedly flogging our wares in our compact but charming booth (K94).
09:51 / BackupAssist / MailStore / MDaemon / News
03 Apr

BackupAssist 6.4 headerFurther to my recent post about the Beta, I'm pleased to announce that we've put the finished version live on our site - so now seems as good a time as any to let you know what's in it... Key to the appeal of version 6.4 are two main features - the all new RecoverAssist console and the dedicated support for iSCSI destinations. Together they open up some really interesting possibilities. We've been putting version 6.4 through its paces as you may have picked up from some of Neil's recent blog posts, and as a result we're all really pleased seeing the direction developer Cortex are headed.
10:40 / BackupAssist
28 Feb

iscsi-icon.jpgHopefully you're already aware that one of the great new features coming in BackupAssist version 6.4 is the native support for iSCSI targets. This feature allows you to run Windows image jobs that fully support incremental updating and history. This is a great feature for disaster recovery backups as it negates the need to have local media (typically USB hard drives) attached to every server or workstation you want protected. I have covered the idea of iSCSI backups in this previous post, but as part of my help with the beta testing of BackupAssist I'm running some real world speed testing on my own Windows 7 box. The aim being to see how long backups will actually take in order to to get an idea of how often they can be run within the day to provide as up to date a backup as possible of the full system drive.
15:21 / BackupAssist
24 Feb

You may have picked up on the grapevine (or the phone when talking to us!), that there's an exciting new version of BackupAssist in the offing. Well, I can confirm the rumours, version 6.4 is due to include both advanced iSCSI support and RecoverAssist, which will make life considerably easier for those of you performing image backups and bare metal restores on 2008/R2/SBS/Hyper-V/Win7/Vista.
10:00 / BackupAssist