28
Feb
Testing the BackupAssist beta (v6.4): Windows image backups to an iSCSI target
Hopefully 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
Over the past few years we've used a variety of different virtualisation tools but have historically always stuck to a mixture of either VMWare tools (esxi, Player and Workstation) or Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform.
These have worked really well for building larger virtual server platforms but recently I was looking for a quick and easy to configure tool that I could use on my own desktop PC. I was just looking to build some simple test machines for evaluating software in a range of scenarios.
After some browsing I came across 
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.
I don't often get asked about the MailStore proxy, as most of our customers tend to use a local email server of some kind such as MDaemon or Microsoft Exchange where it's not needed. Every so often however, I'll be asked about creating a centralised archiving solution for an off-site POP3/ SMTP service which is where it provides a simple but effective solution.
Typically customers using these services will have have been using simple, user-based archiving such as the manual creation of local PST files which may or may not be include in a wider backup strategy - by no means an ideal solution.
We 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.