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
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
04 Apr

Zen Software at Infosec We're but a few weeks away from the annual industry pilgrimage to Earls Court for the biggest of the IT and security shows in this country, InfoSecurity Europe. Each year IT professionals (and the not-so) gather at InfoSec to take in keynote talks from industry experts, strengthen relationships with customers and suppliers, keep an eye on the competition and of course, pick up plenty of promotional tat for the kids. This year will be slightly different however, as visitors will notice that the show's noticeably better than previous ones thanks to the addition of the Zen Software stand in the new exhibitor area. It's possible I'm overestimating the impact we'll have but in any case, we're genuinely pleased to be a part of the show and that we'll be down there unashamedly flogging our wares in our compact but charming booth (K94).
09:51 / BackupAssist / MailStore / MDaemon / News
03 Apr

BackupAssist 6.4 headerFurther to my recent post about the Beta, I'm pleased to announce that we've put the finished version live on our site - so now seems as good a time as any to let you know what's in it... Key to the appeal of version 6.4 are two main features - the all new RecoverAssist console and the dedicated support for iSCSI destinations. Together they open up some really interesting possibilities. We've been putting version 6.4 through its paces as you may have picked up from some of Neil's recent blog posts, and as a result we're all really pleased seeing the direction developer Cortex are headed.
10:40 / BackupAssist
24 Feb

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.
10:00 / BackupAssist
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
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