Cryptolocker is making the headlines for all the wrong reasons at the moment.
In the run up to Christmas where there's likely to be a plentiful supply of email purchase confirmations flowing, I wanted to share my recommendations for keeping your data safe and secure.
In 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.
Yet another new BackupAssist update this morning!
While this one's mainly tweaks and fixes, it does include a feature we've been asked for a lot by customers and will certainly be of interest if you run a version of Exchange on a Hyper-V guest.
We 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:-
If 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.
This morning across the office I overheard the words 'that's grand int'it!?' from our resident BackupAssist technical guru.
I can assure you this doesn't happen often and roughly translated from Yorkshireman-speak, is a resounding seal of approval for the new Exchange Granular Restore 'direct injection' feature in BackupAssist 7.3.
As if BackupAssist wasn't already priced competitively enough, you'll be pleased to know we've just introduced two new discounted bundles to make it even better value when you're buying with plug-ins!
I've outlined what's included in each below and you'll find up to date costs on the pricing page of the main site.
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.
An 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...
