Hi All,

On Tuesday, I think we performed a world’s first operation on our test environments… a bare metal restore from a backup on iSCSI target, from the Windows Recovery Environment.

The problem is that the WinRE (that you get by booting off the Windows installation DVD on Windows Vista and onwards) does not include the iSCSI Initiator. However, we have been experimenting with our own recovery environment that does include the iSCSI Initiator… and we managed to get it to work! Needless to say, we had a small crowd around our test machine when I “clicked the button” to start the restore… we held our breaths (for around 10 minutes) while the restore took place, and there were high fives when the machine booted back up again.

This feature is still in “proof of concept” stage, so it’s many months away from being included in the main BackupAssist release. However, I thought I’d blog about it, because I’m pretty confident that this is the first time anyone has done a bare metal restore from the Windows RE from an iSCSI target. And it could unlock a new way of performing backups and recoveries.

Woo hoo!

Linus

Dear BackupAssist customers,

To prepare for the launch of BackupAssist version 6, our website will be unavailable for 7 hours in the time zones below:

• (US EST) 8th September 2010 from 8:00pm-3:00am
• (AUS EST) 9th September 2010 from 10:00am-5:00pm
• (GMT) 9th September 2010 from 12:00am-7:00am

Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience. We appreciate your understanding.

If you have any questions, please email us at support@backupassist.com.

Best regards,

The Team at BackupAssist

Hi all,

How do you upgrade a BackupAssist installation? Well, up until now, the answer has been: manually.

But one of our Aussie helpdesk team, Aaron, has done a great job in writing a VB script that will download the latest BackupAssist installation to a temp directory, uninstall the old version and install the new version – thereby performing an automated upgrade.

We’ve tested this on a variety of machines – SBS 2003, Vista, XP, Server 2008, and SBS 2008 – and it has worked for us. Now it’s time to turn it over to the community and get some feedback on this.

To run the script – save the text below to a vbs file – say BAUpgrader.vbs – and then run it from the command prompt:

cscript BAUpgrader.vbs

Make sure you’re running the command prompt as the Administrator user, with elevated rights if you have UAC turned on.

If you have any feedback, please post a comment below. We have not yet tested it with management software like Kaseya – but if you’d like to give it a go (in a non-production environment!) please feel free.

Also note that this is a BETA script, so the usual disclaimers apply.

—- BEGIN SCRIPT BELOW – FOR ALL INSTALLATIONS APART FROM SERVER CORE AND HYPER-V SERVER —-
—- Note: this script is subject the same EULA as BackupAssist —-

sTarget = “C:\temp”

Set objFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
If Not objFSO.FolderExists(sTarget) Then
objFSO.CreateFolder(“c:\temp”)
End If

strFileURL = “http://www.backupassist.com/downloads/releases/latest/BackupAssistV5.msi”
strHDLocation = “c:\temp\BackupAssistV5.msi”

Set objXMLHTTP = CreateObject(“MSXML2.XMLHTTP”)

objXMLHTTP.open “GET”, strFileURL, false
objXMLHTTP.send()

If objXMLHTTP.Status = 200 Then

WScript.StdOut.Write “Downloading the latest version of BackupAssist…” & VbCrLf & VbCrLf
Set objADOStream = CreateObject(“ADODB.Stream”)
objADOStream.Open
objADOStream.Type = 1 ‘adTypeBinary

objADOStream.Write objXMLHTTP.ResponseBody
objADOStream.Position = 0

Set objFSO = Createobject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
If objFSO.Fileexists(strHDLocation) Then objFSO.DeleteFile strHDLocation
Set objFSO = Nothing

objADOStream.SaveToFile strHDLocation
objADOStream.Close
WScript.StdOut.Write “Download complete” & VbCrLf & VbCrLf
Set objADOStream = Nothing
End if

Dim installer
Set installer = CreateObject(“WindowsInstaller.Installer”)
strTempProdCode = “”
For Each strProductCode In installer.Products

If installer.ProductInfo(strProductCode, “InstalledProductName”) = “BackupAssist v5″ Then

strTempProdCode = strProductCode
End If

Next

set fso = Wscript.CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

If Not strTempProdCode = “” Then

If fso.FileExists(“C:\Temp\BackupAssistV5.msi”) Then

Dim objShell
strTemp = strTempProdCode & ” /passive”
Set objShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
objShell.Run “%comspec% /c msiexec /x ” & strTemp _
& “& msiexec /package c:\temp\BackupAssistV5.msi /passive”
WScript.StdOut.Write”Automated update was successful”
WScript.Quit

Else WScript.StdOut.Write”The BackupAssist update did not download. The automated update was unsuccessful”

End If

Else
WScript.StdOut.Write “BackupAssist is not currently installed on this machine!”& VbCrLf &”Automatic updating not available!” & VbCrLf & VbCrLf

End If

A new feature in version 5.2.5 of BackupAssist is support for backing up to an Amazon S3 bucket via the service provided by s3rsync.com.

To set this up you will need

• a copy of BackupAssist
• an Amazon Web Services account
• an account with s3rsync.com

In your Amazon Web Services account, you will need to obtain your Access Key ID and generate a Secret Access Key. Then you will need to create an S3 bucket to use for your backups. See http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/amazon-s3-simple-storage-service-guide/3889/ for a good introduction to these topics.

When you sign up for an s3rsync.com account, you will be provided with a username and a private SSH key file. You will need to save the SSH key file somewhere on the machine on which you wish to run BackupAssist.

Once you have performed these preliminary steps, you are ready to set up your job in BackupAssist.
Create a new Rsync job and choose S3Rsync as the destination. If you want your job to run automatically each day, select the Mirror scheme. Next you will be presented with the S3Rsync server settings screen:

• Rsync Server: this should be farm.s3rsync.com (the default setting) unless you have been advised otherwise by s3rsync.com
• Port: this should be 22
• Path on server: you can leave this blank unless you want to set up multiple backup jobs using the same bucket (not recommended)
• S3rsync username: your username supplied by s3rsync.com (note: this is different to your Amazon username)
• S3 bucket: the name of the S3 bucket you created
• S3 id: your S3 Access Key ID
• S3 key: your S3 Secret Access Key
• Ssh key path: the location of the saved SSH key file provided by S3rsync.com

Once you have entered these details, click Next to select which files you want to back up and then complete the job setup.

Hello everyone,

Questions that we often get asked:

• How much faster is eSATA over USB?
• Are 3.5″ drives faster than 2.5″ drives for backup?
• How to RDX drives compare to normal 2.5″ USB drives?
• How do tape drives compare to HDDs in backup speed?
• Is there much difference between drive imaging and file backup?

We simply couldn’t find the answers on the Internet without reading vendors’ shameless marketing propaganda! What we needed was an objective test with real results.

So we spent countless hours testing a range of different devices to answer these questions, and more! Find out the results by downloading one of the following PDFs:

Cheat sheet format – one page summary for busy professionals, including basic recommendations for success.

White paper format – get the full details of all tests, including details on the testing methodology, exact details of all hardware and software used, and a comprehensive discussion on findings and recommendations.

Enjoy!

Linus

Hey all,

Here’s a rough guide to backing up Hyper-V guests (partitions) from the host (root) machine using the drive imaging method in BackupAssist.

1. Activate the Hyper-V VSS writer for Windows Server Backup by clicking the checkbox as shown below.

   

2. Make sure each guest machine has the Backup integration service selected. Start the Hyper-V manager console, and right click on each guest machine and select “Settings”. Then make sure the checkbox shown below is turned on.
   
3. Turn on Shadow Copies on each of your source volumes. As explained in Getting Hyper-V Backups to run fast, this will greatly enhance the speed of your backups.

We’re currently writing a white paper on Hyper-V backups, which will include performance benchmarking, recommended best practices and restore procedures. However, this will probably take another month or so… so that’s why I’ve blogged about the 3 steps above so everyone can get started in the meantime.

Enjoy!

Linus

Hi all,

Just to keep you updated with progress – we’re making good headway on our Tape Drive backup engine for Server 2008. It’ll be a partial replacement for NTBackup, primarily targeted at Server 2008 users, but also useful for past operating systems.

Features that we’re adding in include AES256 encryption and Zip-style compression. Both these features were not available in NTBackup.

Currently we’re doing speed testing to make sure that the backup speed is only limited by the speed of the tape drive. We’re finding that encryption can be done in real-time, but compression is adding significant overhead, and we’re working on improving that.

Our tape drive engine will be capable of backing up local files, folders and VSS aware applications, such as Exchange 2007, Hyper-V guests, and so on. It will also be able to backup network shares.

We’re still targeting a July beta release date, and things are progressing quite well.

Thanks for your patience on this… we’re effectively replacing NTBackup here, which has been developed over more than 10 years, and we’re attempting it in 6 months! I’ll keep everyone posted on progress.

Regards,

Linus

Hi all,

As stated in a previous blog post, Hyper-V Backup Solution, I stated that the time taken for subsequent backups was comparable to the initial backup.

Well, I think I have found a solution to get it to do the fast differential backups that transfer only changed blocks to the backup device!

On your server, run Windows Explorer, and for each volume that you’ll be backing up, right click on the volume and select “Configure shadow copies”, and click “Enable”. If you do this for each volume, this turns on automatic shadow copy creation. This also seems to have the effect of enabling persistent shadow copies, which enables Windows Server Backup to perform the fast differentials.

On our test server, where we have approx. 232GB of data on our Server 2008 / Hyper-V Role machine, backups were taking around 57 minutes before the change (see below). However, after the change, the backup time was slashed to around 3 minutes!

Before making the shadow copy configuration change: 57 minute backups.

After making the shadow copy configuration change: 3 minute backups.

We’re going to continue testing to establish exactly what was causing the slowdown in the first place, as it seems to be specific to Hyper-V. But in the meantime, everyone can now enjoy fast differential backups of Hyper-V servers!

Enjoy

Linus

Hi all,

Today I spent some time playing with Exchange 2007, and I’ve found a way to mount a VSS Exchange Backup (such as that done with Windows Server Backup [imaging]) as a recovery storage group. I only just figured it out, and we’ll be writing up more comprehensive instructions shortly.

But here’s what I did:

Firstly – restore your backup to an alternate location – Follow the steps here How to restore Exchange 2007, but in step 8, choose an Alternate location, and restore the files to somewhere like your desktop or temp directory.

Second – create a RSG in Exchange Server – start the Exchange Management Console > Toolbox > Database Recovery Management. Then enter in the name of your server to connect to the server, and you’ll get the task list. Click on Create a recovery storage group and follow the prompts to create it.

Third – copy over the backup database to the RSG location and rename the files. Copy all the files from the relevant storage group (restored from your backup in step one) into the empty directory created for the RSG in step two. Then you’ll need to rename each file starting with “E” to make it start with “R” instead. Just change the first letter of each file from “E” to “R”.

Fourth – mount the RSG. Do this from the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant (the tool you used in Step two).

You can then merge mailboxes across from the RSG to the main storage group using the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant. Don’t forget to dismount the store and delete the RSG once you’re finished.

Enjoy!

Linus

Hi all,

This is just a note to spread the good news about Exchange Server 2007 backup on Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

We’ve just released v5.2 of BackupAssist, which comes with its very own plug-in for backing up Exchange 2007 servers running locally on Server 2008!

Unfortunately the backup application that comes with Windows Server 2008, Windows Server Backup (wbadmin), does not have built-in support for live streaming backups of Exchange 2007, like Windows Backup (NTBackup) did in the previous versions of Windows. To backup Exchange 2007 on Server 2008 you need an Exchange-aware backup application that supports the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) writer for Exchange 2007. This is exactly what the latest version of BackupAssist now provides!

The new Exchange 2007 Plug-in in BackupAssist uses Windows Server Backup (wbadmin) to backup your Exchange 2007 databases. When you set up and run a Windows Imaging job from within BackupAssist, BackupAssist will automatically detect that Exchange 2007 is installed, and, once detected, will instruct Windows Server Backup to use the VSS writer for Exchange to commit all databases before the backup runs. BackupAssist will then verify the consistency of your Exchange databases, before proceeding with the backup. A record of the Exchange consistency check is also provided in the BackupAssist backup report.

To use the new plug-in all you need to do is make sure that you’ve selected the appropriate volume to backup where Exchange has been installed. If, for example, Exchange Server was installed on your E: drive, just select E: for backup in your volume selections: BackupAssist will take care of the rest!

Hopefully this will comes as great news for all those frustrated system administrators out there who had to resort to using expensive 3rd party Exchange-aware backup applications just to get a live backup of Exchange 2007 on Server 2008.

You can download a trial of BackupAssist v5.2 from our download page to test drive this new capability for yourself. The BackupAssist v5.2 upgrader is also available on our download page if you’re running an older version of BackupAssist.