You may have picked up from our subtle marketing that something new is on the horizon with the next release of BackupAssist, Version 7. Now the public Beta is here I'm excited to be able to finally tell you all about the new features, which include a completely reworked interface design. First off, let me introduce the completely new simplified interface and layout...

We've had a few customers asking about whether our backup software BackupAssist can be used to restore old backups originally created using NTBackup, to a new 2008 server. This isn't such a crazy idea when you consider that at the point that you upgrade to Server 2008 you may well have a large history of old backups from your old 2003 server and still need files from within them on your new server.

SearchServerVirtualisation screenshotBackupAssist's Hyper-V product has been featured in a recent review on the virtualisation pages of the TechTarget group Web site. Acknowledged as one of the smaller players in the Hyper-V backup market, BackupAssist with it's Hyper-V Granular Restore Console received praise as a product that - "offers great value for small and medium-sized businesses"  ...and is "a good place to start if you're an SMB".

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.

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.