After receiving many requests from our family of BackupAssist users, we
are pleased to announce that we have officially launched the BackupAssist
US Support office.

The US Support team members, Michael Farqhuar and myself, Sally Chamness, spent
the month of March at our Headquarters in Melbourne, Australia undergoing intense training
to ensure that we could provide our clients with the best support available.

Michael and I are located near Louisville, KY and are available during the
following hours of operation:
Monday - Friday 9am - 5pm (EST).

You can email us at: support@backupassist.com
with any Sales or Support questions you may have.

Additionally you can discuss any questions you have with us and fellow
BackupAssist users at our support forum: http://backupassist.com/phpBB3/

Cheers
Sally Chamness
US Support Team!

The Mailbox add-on in BackupAssist does work for Exchange 2007, but it also requires a little more configuration and there are two “gotchas” to be wary of.

I have set up a simple test environment on some VMs in our test lab, and the set up works first time, every time.

The gotchas

Exchange 2007 is a 64 bit application and needs to be installed on a 64 bit computer. However, the two known ways of extracting email messages to PST format (the Outlook/PowerShell method or ExMerge) are 32 bit applications, and they link to 32 bit DLLs. As it’s not possible to call 32 bit DLLs from 64 bit code, it means that extracting mailboxes to PST cannot be done on the Exchange Server itself.

FIRST GOTCHA: You need to do the mailbox backup on a machine other than your Exchange Server (ie. remotely), and on a 32 bit OS.

Why Microsoft didn’t see that coming is beyond me!

SECOND GOTCHA: you need the Exchange 2003 Server Management tools installed on your backup computer. This is only available on the Exchange 2003 CD. [Note: we are working on a version of our Mailbox add-on that will only require the Exchange 2007 Server Management Tools, which is available as a free download off the Microsoft website. We hope to make this available shortly.]
 
How to set it all up

1. Pick a machine on which to run your mailbox backups – this must be a 32 bit machine
2. Install the Exchange Management Tools for Exchange 2003 on this machine – follow the instructions outlined in the BackupAssist Exchange Mailbox White Paper from page 7 onwards. Or if your machine is an Exchange 2003 Server then you don’t need to install the management tools (they come with Exchange!)
3. On the same machine, install and run BackupAssist, choose to backup Exchange Mailboxes, and let BackupAssist install the ExMerge program (as outlined in the BackupAssist Exchange Mailbox White Paper)

Our test environment

I followed this procedure on the following test environment:

• Windows Server 2003 Standard, 64-bit OS, with Exchange 2007 installed
• Windows XP 32-bit, with Exchange 2003 Management Tools and BackupAssist v4.0.16 installed

After it was all set up, the mailbox backups worked perfectly, with no additional modifications required. There were no warnings or errors.

As always, we expect that although this procedure will work for the vast majority of our clients, there will always be some tricky or unexpected network setups that will cause problems. In that case, it’s best to contact BackupAssist support, and we’ll investigate on a case-by-case basis.

When configuring a File Replication job, the user will be able to select folders and files to be backed up using a tree-like interface, similar to the existing “Files and folders” settings tab of NTBackup jobs.

There are 4 main factors in the design of the File Replication Engine:

1. Envisaged applications — data backup, VM backup, etc.
2. Mapping of the source path to the destination path
3. Backup History
4. Media Rotation (for portable media, like USB HDD)

1. Envisaged Applications

We anticipated that the File Replication Engine will be very useful for:

• Data backup — thanks to the single instance store architecture, it’s possible to store tens or hundreds of revisions on a single medium. For example, if you have 100GB of data and approximately 1GB changes each day, you will be able to store around 60 “snapshots” of your data on one 160GB USB HDD! This feature will far exceed the typical capabilities of VSS snapshots. To get your data back — just copy the entire snapshotted directory back to your server, or individual files if you prefer.

• VM backup — to backup client VMs, simply use the File Replication Engine to replicate the entire VM directories to a USB HDD. If your server goes down, simply plug the USB HDD into a different machine, install your VM software (eg. VMware Server) and run the virtual machines — this reduces your downtime to virtually zero!

• Exchange backup — backup your Exchange database files by a VSS-compliant file-copy operation, enabling you to forklift the database easily

… if you have other scenarios, we’d like to hear about them to make sure we cater for them all!

2. Mapping of the Source Path to the Destination Path

A single destination folder may be selected for each job. The destination folder may be on a local drive, NAS or removeable media. There are two options for how source files and folders are mapped to files and folders within the destination folder. The user interface will allow selection of one of these options, e.g. using a checkbox.

In the discussion below, it is assumed that the destination folder is X:\Backups.

Option 1: Full path

The full path to each source file will be encoded within the destination folder.

Example

Option 2: Relative to common ancestor

Rather than encoding the full path for each file, use only a sub path relative to the lowest common ancestor of all selected files and folders.

Example 1. One source folder selected

Common ancestor is C:\Foo so backup file paths are relative to this folder.

Example 2. Multiple source folders

Common ancestor is C:\Foo so backup file paths are relative to this folder.

Example 3. Multiple source drives

Selections span multiple drives so there is no common ancestor and the full path to each file, including drive letter, is used in the backup.

3. Backup History

A number of backup schemes will be provided to allow historic backup to be retained. Historic backup stored on the same volume will use a single instance store to ensure that only one copy of unchanged files is stored on the disk. When a scheme with backup history is in use, there will be an extra level of folders within the backup destination folder to store historical backups.

Example (assuming “Full path” option chosen)

This scheme has daily backups stored under destination folder\date.

4. Media Rotation

For portable media, such as USB disk drives, the user will be able to set up media rotation schemes to allow regular backups to be rotated among different volumes. Each volume will hold a set of complete (i.e. not incremental) backups. The single instance store architecture will ensure that identical files are shared between backups within a volume, but not across volumes. For example, if a user has 3 USB HDDs and chooses to rotate them one after the other, the list of backups on each drive might be:

• Drive 1:
  • 2008-05-01
  • 2008-05-06
• Drive 2:
  • 2008-05-02
  • 2008-05-07
• Drive 3:
  • 2008-05-05
  • 2008-05-08

Similarly, if the user has 5 drives (one for each day of the week) then each drive would contain backups of data for every week, and the backup history goes back in one week increments.

Feedback

If you have any comments or suggestions about this proposal, or scenarios for which you think the File Replication Engine would be useful, please let us know by leaving a comment.

We’ve already started work on some of the new features in our next major release, which include:

• Centralized monitoring – view the status of all of your clients’ backups in one report
• File Replication Engine – our latest file-based backup engine that uses a VSS-based file copy to backup files (more about this below)
• Windows Block Level Backup (drive imaging) integration

Our planned timeframe for releasing v5 is Q3 this year (most likely August or September).
Drive Imaging Features are to be released with Version 5
We had previously planned to release our support for the Windows 2008 Drive Imaging features with Version 4.1. However, due to a lack of uptake and demand, we’ve decided to release it as part of Version 5, to coincide with our new File Replication Engine. Apart from giving us extra testing time, it also means that v5.0 will be an excellent backup choice for Windows Server 2008, providing both Drive-Image and File-Based backup options.

When you work with anyone over a period of time, you can build a good relationship with them.

This is true even when dealing with people from a technical support team. But have you ever sat down and wondered, Who are these people? Or, Where did this company come from?

Today I’d like to give you a peek into the wonderful world that is BackupAssist - and even enlighten you with a little company history.

BackupAssist started as a hobby project to help one particular system administrator set up a reliable business grade backup system with NTBackup on Windows NT and 2000.
It was designed to address the shortcomings of NTBackup (inadequate scheduling, media rotation, and monitoring). It would also
overcome a number of bugs within Removable Storage Manager on Windows 2000, where tapes were not being detected in the tape drive causing scheduled backups not to run.

As with many other software developers, this lone system administrator wanted to share the software with others who were having the same issues.

So in 2002 the software was released to the public and a basic website was built for software support.

Immediate feedback for BackupAssist was incredible! By mid-2003, enough users had purchased the software, indicating that continued development was warranted and desired.

Over the next 3 years, new and extra features were added, but always with the view to making backups easy for novice system administrators and with enough advanced
features for the veteran system administrator.

When 2006 came, add-ons for Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange Server mailboxes had been created and were welcomed by our customers.
The Exchange Server add-on was built to take advantage of Microsoft’s Exmerge tool, which exported mailboxes to PST files.

The main aim of the BackupAssist developers is to provide a software which is “Engine Independent” - platform that can integrate with any back-end engine with ease.

In addition, being able to leverage existing backup engines and open standards mean that Research and Development time is reduced, thereby giving BackupAssist a price advantage.

Here at BackupAssist, we are always exploring new paths to find new ways to improve our product for our customers. In fact, as this is being written (May 2008), a whole suite of engines are being developed, including solutions for file based backups, and Internet based file synchronisation and other application backup. Please keep reading our blogs (both support and developer) and as I get more information, I’ll keep you posted on our progress!

cheers,
Aarthi
BackupAssist Support Team