In this new video presentation BackupAssist’s Senior Developer Jason Schultz runs through the new features in BackupAssist v6.4.0 and gives an overview on iSCSI as a backup destination, Disaster Recovery and performing a recovery with RecoverAssist.
Topics Covered:
The Benefits of iSCSI
Working with iSCSI
iSCSI and BackupAssist
Disaster Recover from iSCSI? YES!
It has been discovered that certain versions of Kaspersky Anti-Virus can cause computers to halt and Blue Screen.
This issue is caused by Kaspersky Anti-Virus v6 and can effect BackupAssist v5.x.x and BackupAssist v6.x.x on all Windows operating systems.
To rectify this conflict you will need to uninstall Kaspersky Anti-Virus and install the latest version of Kaspersky.
Our support engineers have verified this solution and encourage all users to have the latest and most up to date Anti-Virus software installed.
In order to continue to improve our products and service offerings, we will be upgrading our servers on Sunday 22nd of April.
Throughout this time our website and several of our web based services will be unavailable. The maintenance is expected to last for up to a maximum of 12 hours beginning at 10am AEST.
Backups will continue to operate through this time.
For the latest news and updates during this maintenance period please follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Once again we apologize for this interruption, thank you for your patience and for choosing BackupAssist.
In addition to the major features in added in BackupAssist v6.4.0 such as added support for iSCSI backups and the all new RecoverAssist. There are also some important bug fixes which address problems our Technical Support Engineers have recently discovered. A quick overview of these fixes is listed below:
License deactivation (FB 11398)
Several users have been having difficulties deactivating their BackupAssist licenses and they have had to request assistance from Technical Support. The problem has been intermittent and we have been unable to reproduce the problem. In order to address the problem we’ve taken two approaches. Firstly, we’ve improved the error handling so that an error during deactivation should no longer cause the program to shut-down with an exception. Secondly, we’ve improved the messages which are written to the log files during deactivation, so that if the problem should occur again in the future we will be better able to diagnose and fix the problem.
Service shutting down after a few seconds (FB 11676, FB 10324)
There has been several cases recently where the service will only run for a few seconds and then shutdown. The problem appears to be caused by one or more jobs becoming corrupt which stops the service. We’ve put in some defensive code which will delete any invalids jobs during the service startup. In the event that an invalid job is automatically deleted a message will be made in the log file. We have also introduced an auto-recovery feature for the service so that it will attempt to restart itself in the event that it shuts down due to an error.
Fix potential error in Hyper-V / CSV backups (FB 11912)
When Hyper-V guests are running in a CSV environment, it is possible that they may perform a migration whilst a backup is running. In order to monitor this, BackupAssist makes a list of all guests which were on the node being backed up both prior to the backup commencing and again after completion. If the list is not the same after completion, the user will be alerted in the backup report that the backup may be incomplete. In some situations this mechanism fails due to a VSS error which was previously not being handled by BackupAssist. A fix has been introduced which handles the VSS error and now includes a message in the job’s report (BA4709) alerting the user that BackupAssist was not able to check whether any guests were missed.
BackupAssist v6.4.0 can be downloaded online.
Dear Valued Customers,
We would like to inform you that our Australian technical support office will be closed over the Easter holiday period on the following dates:
Good Friday: 6th April 2012
Easter Monday: 9th April 2012
Technical support services from the Australian office will be unavailable on these days, including both phone and email. For urgent assistance you are welcome to contact our US office.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and wish you and your family a safe and happy Easter holiday!
Kind regards,
The Team at BackupAssist
Cortex IT Labs today announced the latest release in their flagship product BackupAssist.
BackupAssist v6.4.0 makes a large step forward for the BackupAssist product in adding support for iSCSI backups as well as the all new RecoverAssist recovery environment.
BackupAssist now supports backing up to and recovering from iSCSI devices. iSCSI backups out performs all other network backups and USB 2.0 – which makes for faster backups. In fact iSCSI can perform up to twice as fast as other backup destinations.
RecoverAssist makes light work of Windows® backup recoveries. Bare metal disaster recovery. Recover to dissimilar hardware. Create your own recovery media. Repairs broken recoveries. You name it RecoverAssist helps you do it. With an integrated tool-kit that automatically repairs recoveries that otherwise would Blue Screen with standard Windows Recovery software. You can even load your own drivers onto the recovery environment. What more could you ask for in a recovery tool-kit?
The latest version of BackupAssist can be downloaded online from BackupAssist.com. BackupAssist v6.4.0 is a free upgrade for all existing BackupAssist v6 licence holders. Current BackupAssist v4 or v5 customers will need to upgrade their licence online to use the added functionality in BackupAssist v6.4.0. Upgrades can be purchased online.
Full release notes can be found online.
BackupAssist v6.4.0 no longer includes support for Windows 2000.
Hi Everyone,
A customer of ours with a large number of BackupAssist installs were having issues with their CMC reports appearing irregularly. A machine may report to the CMC portal 3 days in a row, then not at all for 7 days, etc.
A few remote sessions on certain machines and performing some tests whilst monitoring network activity revealed that it was an issue with the network setup. Our developers had made a few improvements within BackupAssist to counter these issues and improve the situation; we were never able to fully overcome it. After performing some additional testing, it was discovered that when performing a trace route to www.backupassist.com/cmc from one of the problematic machines, that it was hitting the ISP’s routers (outside of both his and our configuration control) and not getting any further.
What had been happening was that the customer’s network had quite a number of machines; but only one connection to their ISP – so as far as the Internet was concerned all of the machines had same IP address. All backups that were scheduled to finish within a certain amount of time would then submit their reports to the BackupAssist CMC server.
The ISP was able to investigate and make the necessary changes on their end at the customer’s request and now all systems are able to contact the BackupAssist CMC server without any interruption. The customers CMC service is now fully reliable and always up to date.
The CMC requests from BackupAssist which are sent through as generic https (port 443) and http (port 80) requests. If you find you’re having similar issues; it could be worth discussing this with your ISP as well.
For more information about using or licencing the BackupAssist CMC please click here.
If you have any further questions or comments; please feel free to contact us via e-mail at support@backupassist.com.
Kind Regards;
Stuart
BackupAssist Support Team
Hi everyone,
There are a lot of people who ask what’s the best way to get multiple copies of their image backup. There has been instances where manually copying the image backup has resulted in restore failures. Some had observed this as a security feature implemented by Windows so that the backup could only be restored with the original destination.
There were other instances where people said that they’d had no such bad experience and were able to restore from a backup which was copied across to another device.
I hadn’t personally seen this work ever – it was just word of mouth from various sources. I wanted to see this for myself and thought that some people may benefit also.
The following was produced by following the premise below:
| Operating System | Similar Hardware | Dissimilar Hardware |
|---|---|---|
| Server 2008 (SP1 installed) |  |
|
| Server 2008 (SP2 installed) | |
|
| Server 2008 R2 |  |
 |
With the Server 2008 (SP1 & SP2) tests, both were able to detect the backup on USB B but when it came to restoring the backup they received Error Details: Element Not Found (0×80070490). It appears that the reason for this is that a unique hardware identifier of USB A is referenced and when restoring from USB B, the identifier doesn’t match causing the failure.
Upon doing some further research, it sounds as if a lot of people have had this exact issue in live situations; however I wasn’t able to find any of them giving a resolution or work around.
When performing the restore of Server 2008 R2 to dissimilar hardware, initially the restore was successful although the system would not boot; just open Complete PC Restore and once complete; reboot again. I was required to run a registry fix using RecoverAssist; which is a recovery tool which comes packaged with BackupAssist v6.4 onward. More about RecoverAssist can be found here.
If you’re running a Server 2008 R2 generation operating system (Server 2008 R2, SBS 2011, etc.) then it is possible to copy your image backup to different devices and not cause any restoration doubts.
When running Server 2008 generation operating systems (Server 2008, SBS 2008, etc.); it’s highly recommended that you create a new backup on each device using BackupAssist instead of making manual copies. This will most likely avoid some heartache in the event that you’re required to perform a Bare Metal Recovery of your data.
If you have any feedback/personal experiences/questions regarding this (especially if you’ve found a way to restore using first generation Server 2008 operating systems), please contact us by e-mailing support@backupassist.com.
Kind Regards,
Stuart
BackupAssist Support Team
BackupAssist v6.3.1
BackupAssist v6.3.1 has been released. This maintenance release focuses on a host of fixes and improvements for HyperV backups.
Users of Clustered Share Volumes (CSV) are strongly recommended to upgrade to the latest version. For more information you can read the full release notes or download now.
Dear Valued Customers,
We would like to inform you that our Australian technical support office will be closed on Tuesday 6th March 2012.
Technical support services from the Australian office will be unavailable on this day, including both phone and email. For urgent assistance you are welcome to contact our US office.
Support in our Australian office will resume as usual on Wednesday 7th March 2012.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.
Best wishes,
The Team at BackupAssist
