BackupAssist Backup Software - New VideoJust a quick one to let you know I've just added a video with the shortest possible explanation I can manage of why BackupAssist should be of interest if you're a small business (or work with one). I hope you enjoy this latest addition to our Youtube channel - please hit the subscribe button if you'd like to be notified of future updates.

If your business closes over the holiday period, and you're 100% confident your data won't be changing while you're away, it's quite likely that you'd rather be eating, drinking and being merry than disappearing off to needlessly change a USB hard drive. A little-known feature of BackupAssist may just ensure your home remains harmonious this festive period. The scheduling calendar makes it simple to prevent a backup from running on a specific day(s), and here's how you use it.

BackupAssist announcementIn the latest version of BackupAssist (7.3.1), there was a change to the activation process I'd like to make you aware of as it's understandably catching a few customers out. In the latest version there was a change implemented to help ensure that as a customer you're on the 'local' build of the software, complete with support links that point back to our technical team here in the UK.

BackupAssist Technical Support InsightWe often get support queries where the PC clock has been the cause of an issue but never have I seen a few minutes of drift make such a difference. This one isn't actually specific to BackupAssist but it did rear its head with a customer who happened to be storing their backups on a local NAS. The backup job in question was a 'file protection' one, so the simple backup of files to a local network share as a destination. The job had run fine for many days without errors but suddenly overnight the job would fail with an error like the one below:-

Move your BackupAssist folderIf you've been using BackupAssist for a long time, and the drive you installed it on wasn't the largest to begin with, you might be finding it's starting to outgrow it. Your BackupAssist installation folder will become larger over time, primarily because it stores reports and diagnostic files in the program data folder. Why not just delete old reports? Well you could, and that will help as a quick fix but it will only stop the problem temporarily. The developers are aware that some more options would be useful here to better manage this, but in the meantime, here's a simple workaround you can deploy to reclaim that space by moving BackupAssist to a different drive which takes up most of the space.