BackupAssist imaging jobs utilise the Microsoft Windows imaging engine to backup and write your data. As some of you may already be aware, there is a known Microsoft issue when using the Windows imaging engine to back up to a destination drive that is utilising 4K bytes per cluster. This typically relates to the larger (>2TB) USB hard drives that are now becoming more common. Some hard drives can be reformatted using 512 bytes per cluster rather than 4K bytes per cluster but unfortunately not all have this option.

http://www.zensoftware.co.uk/blogresources/2012/11/ba7Beta_box.pngOne of the most noticeable changes in version 7 of BackupAssist is how it looks and feels, so I thought I'd use this first of two preview posts to take an early look at the new interface in a little more detail. Earlier iterations of BackupAssist have often been praised for their simple interface layout and ease of use, so when I first heard that the developers were looking to improve on this for version 7, I'll admit to being a little apprehensive!

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.