09 Oct

Its been a while since I recommended a useful free software tool. But this time I want to introduce a tool that I have been using for many years but recently have found very useful specifically when dealing with Rsync jobs in BackupAssist. Introducing WINSCP WINSCP is developed by Martin Prikryl  of Putty fame.  It is a simple utility that at first glance works in exactly the same way as an FTP client but with  some very useful features that stand out.
15:15 / Tech tips
25 Sep

Our Aussie friends over at BackupAssist developers Cortex IT have recently released two excellent short videos showing the best practices for configuring the BackupAssist user identity. I often come across issues relating to rights associated with BackupAssist jobs. The BackupAssist user identity is key to correctly assigning these rights, so if you are using BackupAssist to back up a Windows Server we these are definitely worth a watch.

Creating Backup User Identities with BackupAssist

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gcVOHF6tZY?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]

10:22 / BackupAssist
21 Aug

Hyper-V Youtube screengrabA little over a month ago, I announced our friends 'down under' at BackupAssist developer Cortex IT were hosting a webinar for a limited number of channel partners from around the globe - presented by Jason Schultz, one of the lead programmers. There were a few of you who were busy with the day jobs and weren't able to attend so the guys at Cortex have kindly uploaded the recorded version to YouTube, ready for viewing over a cuppa. Perhaps a few cuppas actually - it's a long one at a just under an hour but it really is worth sitting through if you've got any interest in using BackupAssist in a Hyper-V environment.
11:58 / BackupAssist
06 Jul

As part of ongoing improvements to our own network, I recently revised the way we approach backing up the SQL database that underpins our main company Web site. We currently host the web and SQL server in a local data centre and were taking off-site daily backups using a combination of BackupAssist and the Rsync add-on. This was adequate for restoring a snapshot of the website or database to the previous day, but I wanted to improve the frequency of our backups given how often the database is changing as we take orders throughout the day. Luckily BackupAssist was there to help!
09:00 / BackupAssist
05 Jul

Hyper-V webinarOur Aussie friends over at BackupAssist developer Cortex IT, have opened up a great opportunity for our partners to attend the first in what we hope will be a series of online Webinar/ Q&A sessions. They're presented directly by the BackupAssist development team and are a unique chance to hear about BackupAssist's Hyper-V backup capabilities while also providing feedback should you wish.
16:43 / BackupAssist
05 Jul

I came across an issue on a support call the other day I thought worth sharing as it's bound to be something a few of you will see too.
The customer I was talking to was using the Windows imaging engine in BackupAssist to back up both their system drive 'C:' and a large data drive 'D:' (used for every day document storage etc.).
This was working just as expected and backups were updating quickly to a local USB hard drive when the inevitable happened - they had a local hard drive failure and of course wanted to perform a bare metal recovery from the last good image backup.
09:04 / BackupAssist / Support queries shared
04 Jul

In the last couple of weeks I've come across a few customers with MailStore installations where they've experienced corruption of their archived data due to either a damaged disk, RAID failure or power outage for example. All of these situations are of course completely outside of MailStore's control but they're ones where the only practical recovery method is to rebuild from a previous backed up version of the MailStore data.
14:57 / BackupAssist / MailStore