If your business closes over the holiday period, and you're 100% confident your data won't be changing while you're away, it's quite likely that you'd rather be eating, drinking and being merry than disappearing off to needlessly change a USB hard drive. A little-known feature of BackupAssist may just ensure your home remains harmonious this festive period. The scheduling calendar makes it simple to prevent a backup from running on a specific day(s), and here's how you use it.

BackupAssist announcementIn 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.

BackupAssist Technical Support InsightWe 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:-

We're a relatively small team here at Zen Software and one of the things we really like about that is if and when you ever need our help, be it pre or post-sales, we're able to offer you more of a personal level of service than some of the industry giants we're often competing with. Particularly as a small or medium sized business, we know how much importance you  place on being able to get answers when you need them. With this in mind, and as part of an ongoing program of improvements, we've upped our game a little with a few 'service enhancements' shall we say!

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.

BackupAssist Maintenance Release
BackupAssist have made a minor update of their fantastic backup software live today and as always, it's available on our Web site for download.
This release consists mostly of minor fixes and there's couple of small feature updates in there for good measure too.

You may recall a little over a month ago us announcing the brand new major release of BackupAssist version 7.1.That included an impressive range of new features such as a beta of the new Exchange Granular Restore (EGR) add-on, support for Exchange 2013, enhanced support for Server 2012 and history for imaging backups on NAS and RDX drives. Well, following up the great work on 7.1, Australian developer Cortex have completed the EGR add-on beta phase and have released the feature in full in this latest iteration of our favourite backup software for small businesses.