Following on from my last post where I mentioned this fantastically simple software for creating your own NAS (ideal for BackupAssist's Rsync feature), in this post I'm going to take things a step further and outline how to go about setting it up.
For a long time now I've been experimenting with different hardware and software solutions, looking for an all purpose storage server I could use both at home and in the office. At home I've basically just been after a centralised store for my photos, movies and documents with a level of integration that would also allow me to stream content to various different devices. In the office we need a bit more, so support for technologies such as Rsync, SSH, iSCSI, RAID drives and NFS have all been on my wish list.
Just a quick update to let you know about a great little free utility I've stumbled upon that you might find handy if you're a user of BackupAssist.
I've recently been testing BackupAssist with iSCSI target destinations and have been using the iSCSI target built into Microsoft Server 2008 R2. This works great but unfortunately is only available for 2008 servers. 
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). We've seen a few issues recently where a Windows image backup job has failed due to the destination drive partition being larger than 2TB. Unfortunately the errors generated can differ,...
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.
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 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.
