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.

We have seen two instances recently where BackupAssist has been used to run an image job on HP Proliant servers but the job fails 98% through the image of the C: drive with the error 'Drive Cannot Find the Sector Requested'. This would usually point to physical drive sector issues and a possible dying disk, but after some further investigation it would appear that this is actually a specific issue to do with the pre-installed status of System partitions on HP Proliant range of Server platforms.

Exchange Granular Restore Feature PreviewAn early heads up for you in video form this morning about a great new addition to BackupAssist's Exchange Granular Restore functionality. Pencilled in for release in the next couple of weeks, v7.3 of BackupAssist will provide you with the ability to quickly find items in your Exchange database backup, and directly restore them to another Exchange server. See below for the 2 minute preview video...

BackupAssist Maintenance Release
BackupAssist have made a minor update of their fantastic backup software live today and as always, it's available on our Web site for download.
This release consists mostly of minor fixes and there's couple of small feature updates in there for good measure too.

You may recall a little over a month ago us announcing the brand new major release of BackupAssist version 7.1.That included an impressive range of new features such as a beta of the new Exchange Granular Restore (EGR) add-on, support for Exchange 2013, enhanced support for Server 2012 and history for imaging backups on NAS and RDX drives. Well, following up the great work on 7.1, Australian developer Cortex have completed the EGR add-on beta phase and have released the feature in full in this latest iteration of our favourite backup software for small businesses.