Blog

25 Oct

I often get asked about the best way to create off-site image backups. One logical approach is to use a windows network share for the destination, however because the destination is not accessible at the disk sector level, the incremental imaging feature can't be used. A full image backup must be taken each time the job runs which can take significantly more time as well as requiring a larger amount of storage if you wish to keep multiple images. For this reason, we often recommend that customers stick to local destinations for image backups with history, and plug in either a local dedicated USB hard drive or a pool of USB drives. This approach works very well and allows for multiple images a day, typically taking less than an hour to run on an average SBS server. However the disadvantages of relying on local backups are clear in that they're still susceptible to loss, theft and damage. An often overlooked solution for image backups that combines the best features from both of these methods is iSCSI.
12:35 / BackupAssist
21 Oct

STG.jpg STG is one of those tools that only performs the one job, but performs it very well indeed. Simply put, STG is a real-time graphing utility for monitoring any device that supports SNMPv1 and v2 ( Simple Network Managment Protocol).
08:00 / Tech tips
18 Oct

MailStore Home EditionMailStore "Home" has been gaining some real momentum globally as a great little solution for single users who want to archive their mail securely. Following more than 1,500,000 free downloads of MailStore Home to date, German developer deepInvent have responded to consumer feedback and introduced a range of new and sought-after features to MailStore Home 5 which went live today on their site. >>> Downloaded MailStore Home version 5.0 here <<< (please note that Zen Software are unable to offer support on MailStore Home at this time)
13:29 / MailStore
10 Oct

Mailstore versus Exchange banner

Before I start, don't worry - I'm not for a minute going to disguise this an impartial and exhaustive comparison of the two offerings given our slight bias here in the direction of MailStore. I am however, asked quite often asked if I can highlight any differences so with this in mind, I've compiled just a handful of points that differentiate the two that may be of interest if you're currently weighing up the various archiving options available to you.

15:42 / MailStore
07 Oct

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQP0gkPnEcY] This week I want to introduce Evernote. If you're anything like me you are probably working on a number of different projects at the same time. Historically I have found many different approaches to keeping organised, ranging from scribbling on notepads or creating text files that end up scattered around my PC, to using Outlook "tasks" and other dedicated tools. All of these approaches have had their own drawbacks which is where I've found that Evernote steps in.
08:00 / Tech tips
30 Sep

HDTune.jpg In this section of the blog, each week I'll be sharing with you one of the many software applications (often "freebies") that I find useful in my day-to-day role here at Zen Software. This week I want to introduce HDTune Pro.
09:00 / Tech tips
29 Sep

We were recently asked if you could recover a Windows Image Backup of a 2008 R2 server taken with BackupAssist directly to a newly created Hyper-V Virtual Machine.  This was something that should work in theory as part of the 'recover to dissimilar hardware' function of Windows image backups, but there are a few considerations that have to be met for a clean restore process. So here is the best way we have found to achieve this.
09:00 / BackupAssist