Blog

15 Feb

Before I start, I should warn you, this may be a rare issue that only effects a handful of customers - in particular those that use older NAS hardware. However, through diagnosing this issue I've learned much more about how the media usage report works with BackupAssist rsync jobs and thought it would be useful to share my findings.
09:49 / BackupAssist
10 Feb

We've seen a noticeable increase over the past few months in the number of customers performing Hyper-V backups using BackupAssist, so I'm hoping some of you will find it useful to hear about an issue we helped resolve recently. The customer was running BackupAssist on their Hyper-V host system and had initially been performing a backup of the system state and some data which was working fine, when they added the Hyper-V guest machines though, it produced this error each time: ERROR - A Volume Shadow Copy Service operation error has occurred
14:16 / BackupAssist
06 Feb

Single Instance StoreWe had an interesting support call the other day that I thought might be useful to share. The customer who called was using BackupAssist on multiple sites and using rsync jobs to backup from a number of Windows machines, to a central one running CWRsync. Everything was working well but there was some confusion as to how much space each job was taking up on the rsync server.
13:32 / BackupAssist
01 Feb

Since the introduction of Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service in Server 2003 it is common to backup the Exchange database in its entirety as part of a bare-metal backup job. This is a great way to deal with a disaster such as a hard drive failure where you want to recover a whole server, or even if you need to recover the whole Exchange database back to a point in time.  The difficulty comes when you want to recover, for example just a single mailbox, or even specific emails.  With a full backup, you are backing up the entire database which means you’ll need to recover the full database first to a temporary location, mount this as a recovery database, connect to it with a client and then extract the data.  With a large database this could take quite a lot of time and resources to complete. BackupAssist has a much easier, more convenient way.
10:23 / BackupAssist
19 Jan

I'm slightly concerned that the news of a virtual information blackout yesterday may have detracted somewhat from the REALLY big stories that were breaking. Yes, had you have been paying proper attention you'd have noticed two new product updates from our Texan friends over at developer Alt-N Technologies. Ok, so it's possible I'm overhyping these a fraction but if you're a user of either product they're worth knowing about all the same.

10:53 / MDaemon / SecurityGateway
18 Jan

If you've ever used BackupAssist to run an rsync job to a remote NAS device, you may be familiar with the built in 'seed' function. This bypasses the need to run a large backup for the first time over the network and instead uses a USB hard drive to move the data manually. After the seed job has completed, the drive is disconnected from the BackupAssist server and plugged directly into whatever is performing the role of the rsync server. Often it's a NAS device, but I also talk to customers who choose to run either a Linux server which has native rsync support or even a Windows box using the free open source CWRsync service.
13:42 / BackupAssist
12 Jan

ninite.png If you regularly find yourself installing and upgrading software, I highly recommend you take a peep at Ninite, a great little online service-come-software tool for managing this process completely hands free. To get up and running, first you'll need to visit ninite.com and select all the software packages you wish to include in your custom installer.
12:28 / Tech tips
11 Jan

Today I want to highlight two very different automatic features of WorldClient, autoresponders and autocomplete. Totally unrelated but both useful features that help Outlook users feel at home. Autorespondersauto-responder.jpg WorldClient makes it very easy to setup and schedule an 'Out of office' Autoresponder, often used over holiday periods but also useful when you know you're going to be out of the office.
10:00 / MDaemon