We’ll be exhibiting at both TechEd Sydney and SMB Nation Seattle in the next 2 months.

If you’re attending these events, please drop by for a visit.

The dates are:

TechEd - Wednesday 3rd September - Friday 5th September - please visit our booth. Linus will also be attending the SBS2008 pre-day on Tuesday 2nd September.

SMB Nation - Friday 3rd October - Monday 6th October - visit our booth (#115 opposite Microsoft) and attend our presentation.

We’ll be launching v5 of BackupAssist at the SMB Nation event. Be sure to attend Linus’ presentation as well:

Combining Drive Imaging, Data Archiving and Internet Backup to achieve complete data protection… at no extra cost!

The latest drive imaging features in Windows Server 2008 make bare metal recoveries easier than ever. However, gaping holes still remain, meaning that businesses are still vulnerable to data loss.

In his presentation, Linus Chang will talk about the limitations of Server 2008 backup; current methods for imaging, file & application backup and internet replication, and the “sweet spot” that each backup technique provides. You’ll learn why individual techniques provide only partial protection, but how combining them together provides a watertight solution. You’ll be stunned as Linus demonstrates how to do this at no additional cost or complexity to your clients.

Hello everyone,

Did you know - you can set up your managed platform or server monitoring system to recognize BackupAssist’s events to accurately report on the backup status?

There are 3 events that BackupAssist may log to the Windows Event Log:

ID 5633 (Information) on success, or success with minor warnings
ID 5634 (Error) on failure
ID 5635 (Warning) on success but with major warnings (eg. wrong external HDD connected).

For all the events:
- Source: BackupAssist
- Category: None

All this functionality is in Version 4 of BackupAssist.

Enhancements for v5 of BackupAssist

We are currently working with the major Managed Platform vendors to integrate the BackupAssist events into their software. We hope that this will be all complete for the release of v5 of BackupAssist.

We’ll also be adding another event to signify the start of a backup job, so people using the event log will have more information about their backup.

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.