UPDATE: Exchange 2007 backup on Server 2008 is now possible thanks to a plug-in released with BackupAssist v5.2. Find out more.

Hi all,

This refers to backing up Exchange Server 2007 with the BackupAssist plug-in for Windows Server Backup.

If your Exchange Server 2007 is running continuous replication, then VSS backups will NOT be done on the actual Exchange databases. Instead, they are done on the replica of the databases, as noted in Scott Schnoll’s blog:

http://blogs.technet.com/scottschnoll/archive/2006/12/11/continuous-replications-and-exchange-backups.aspx

So for example, if you use LCR and your Exchange databases are stored on E: and the copy is stored on F:, you’ll need to select F: for backup.

If your copy is on a different server (CCR) then it doesn’t look like it’s possible to backup Exchange locally. I’m trying to confirm this with some of our customers.

I’ll keep everyone posted on developments.

Regards,

Linus

For the last month, we’ve been testing and working on Hyper-V integration with BackupAssist to provide a backup solution for Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.

Today, I’m pleased to announce our strategy, and that we’re due to release our Hyper-V support in our next update, v5.2 – which is due out next week.

Please note: I will follow this blog entry with a full discussion and case study. I started writing it, found it ran to many pages, and decided to keep it brief on this blog. This blog entry refers to backing up the Hyper-V machines from the host, for rapid disaster recovery purposes. I’ll address the question of backing up from within the guest at a later date.

Hyper-V integration with Windows Server Backup

We’ve put in an easy way to select Hyper-V backup from within the BackupAssist console, as shown below:

The UI will clearly show what VMs are on your system, and which volumes you’ll need to select to back them up. (But for various good reasons, we won’t force you to back them up.)

Recommended backup device

Our recommended backup device for backups of this type (complete system imaging) is eSata hard drive. We easily achieve 150 GB/hr transfer rates on even desktop grade hardware. We only got about half that throughput on USB 2.0, with the same hard drive enclosure.

We also recommend that multiple disks be used for the backup, so they can be swapped onsite and offsite, according to a media rotation strategy. Use the reminder email, media checking and eSata hardware support (safely remove hardware and scan for new hardware) in BackupAssist to ensure that the backups are performed according to plan.

BackupAssist running on Hyper-V Server and Server 2008 with Hyper-V role

BackupAssist can run on both Server 2008 and Hyper-V Server (the free download from the Microsoft website), so you can install BackupAssist on both variants. Be sure to download the correct version of BackupAssist, as the version for Server Core and Hyper-V is much bigger and includes several prerequisites.

Performance testing

We’re part way through performance testing to assess what level of performance degradation that guests machines might experience when a backup is running on the host.

So far, we’ve found that the actual backup duration of successive backups is actually comparable to that of the initial backup, so the speed advantage normally expected from differential imaging doesn’t seem to be there.

However, the highly efficient storage of past versions of backups does perform as expected. On our test machines, we’re backing up just over 140 GB, consisting of Windows Server 2008, plus 6 Hyper-V guests. Each time we run a backup, the overall backup size increases somewhere between 0.5 GB and 1 GB. This clearly demonstrates that the differences are small and that hundreds of days of backup history is possible on each device.

Based on our testing, for the size of the systems we’re simulating, we recommend running the backups no more than 3 times per day. When we conduct more testing, we’ll be able to come up with more thorough guidelines.

Again – we’ll be releasing this updated version of BackupAssist next week, and I hope to publish my performance test results as well around the same time.

UPDATE: Exchange 2007 backup on Server 2008 is now possible thanks to a plug-in released with BackupAssist v5.2. Find out more.

Hi all,

Yes! We’ve just gone into beta with our plug-in into Windows Server Backup that supports backups of Exchange 2007 on Server 2008.

It will automatically detect if Exchange Server 2007 is installed on the machine, and if so, it will automatically instruct Windows Server Backup to use the VSS writer for Exchange to commit all databases before the backup. Then, the BackupAssist Exchange 2007 Plug-in for Windows Server Backup will verify the consistency of the Exchange databases, and once verified the backup will proceed.

You must, of course, make sure that you’ve selected the appropriate volumes to backup! If Exchange Server is on your E: drive, make sure you select E: for backup!

A record of the Exchange consistency check is provided in the backup report – and an example screenshot is provided below. I’ve tested this on both Windows Server 2008 with Exchange 2007, and also SBS 2008 (where the BackupAssist Exchange consistency checker replaces the Microsoft one).

Now for the record, I really wish we had this available sooner. However, the reason for the delay is that Microsoft only released their API for Windows Server Backup on 22nd January 2009. That’s nearly a year after Server 2008 was released, giving Microsoft’s internal development teams nearly a one year head start on the public! Once we had access to the API, it took us less than 2 weeks to develop a solution and release it for public beta. Of course, you can imagine my frustration at Microsoft’s delay in releasing the API. And having spoken to a *lot* of resellers and sysadmins, I know you’re frustrated too that until now, you’ve not had a solution for backing up Exchange 2007 on Server 2008. But my rants are perhaps a story for another time.

In the meantime, I hope that everyone enjoys this beta and please provide us feedback (when contacting our tech support team, please attention correspondence to “Linus” to make sure it gets to me promptly).

Hi world,

Thanks to an excellent suggestion of one of our resellers, we’ve included in our latest release (v5.1.2) a feature that allows you to export all Notes, Contacts, Calendar, Journal (and any other specified folders) to each PST file, regardless of date range.

For those who aren’t familiar with how our Mailbox Add-on works – we export mail items for each private mailbox to PST files, and group them by date range (such as by month, quarter, or year). This prevents PST files from getting too large, and it also is useful for archiving purposes.

The default behaviour of BackupAssist is to export everything that falls by date range into the different PST files. While great for emails, it also means that if you want to recover all your notes and contacts, you need to open each PST file and copy the items back, because only those contacts that were created in the given time period would be in a given PST file. [Hope this makes sense - eg. if I add a contact in January 08, that will be in the Jan-08 PST file, but if I add it in March 08, it will be in the Mar-08 PST file.]

Now what we’ve done instead is give you the option to put all notes, contacts, calendar, journal, etc., items in every PST file, so the recovery is much simpler.

To use this new feature, upgrade to v5.1.2, and in the advanced options tab, check the box to say “Always backup contacts, notes, etc, without date restriction”. It’s that simple. Note: you need to explicitly activate this feature, as our general policy with upgrades is not to alter the default behaviour.

Enjoy!

Linus

Hi all,

After about a month of investigation and testing, we’ve released our Rsync compatible NAS list. We searched far and wide for NAS devices that are Rsync enabled, and we managed to find 4 such devices.

Read about it in our Rsync compatible NAS report.

Each of these NAS devices can be easily configured to work with BackupAssist’s Rsync client, meaning that you can get a practically “off the shelf” solution for offsite backups. A small amount of configuration is required, but as you can see in the document, it’s overall pretty simple and a matter of “joining the dots”. (Click this link for more information about the BackupAssist Windows Rsync client

However, one NAS device came out on top – the QNAP devices – because they were the only device that supported Rsync over SSH. We’ll now be continuing with the QNAP device (which was so good, we bought one for ourselves) and running some further performance tests – from a in-file delta bandwidth efficiency viewpoint.

Enjoy this information, and feel free to leave any comments if you wish to share them with others.

Hi all,

There’s been quite some interest in our Rsync Engine in BackupAssist – which is a great way of sending data offsite in a bandwidth efficient way: http://www.backupassist.com/BackupAssist/tour_Rsync.html

It allows you to backup to any Rsync Server – being Linux box, Windows or NAS.

The Windows setup procedure for installing an Rsync Server on a Windows machine is currently a bit tedious, as we rely on a 3rd party package called cwRsyncServer.

However, we are in the process of developing our own module that will enable you to setup a Windows machine as an Rsync Server without having to mess around with config settings, etc.

Aim: Allow administrators to easily set up a Windows machine as an Rsync Server, to host data for multiple clients (each with their separate allocated space), and implement a security model that restricts client access to their own backup directory.

So it’s currently in development, with an ETA of late in this quarter (ie. March).

If anyone has additional requests for features, please leave some comments here

Hello all – after an hour of fun and experimentation, we figured out how to configure a Drobo device with DroboShare as a Rsync server. I hope these instructions will save hours of headaches as Windows admins learn how to set up the DroboShare, an embedded Linux device!

We’ll be incorporating this into our Rsync White Paper complete with pictures and screenshots… but in the meantime, here are the bleeding edge instructions:

To use your Drobo as an Rsync server with BackupAssist you will first need to install and configure it with an Rsync Deamon.

1) Begin by setting up your Drobo as per the manufactures instructions, ensuring that you have enabled your Drobo to run DroboApps by doing the following:
From the Drobo Dashboard please open “Advanced Controls” and choose the “Tools” tab and then click “Setup” from the DroboShare section. Click the “DroboApps” tab and check “Enable DroboApps.”
2) You will then need to download the Drobo Rsync client and place the downloaded file in the DroboApps folder of your Drobo.
Client available from http://www.drobo.com/droboapps/downloads/index.php?id=12
3) To finish the installation of the Rsync on your Drobo you will need to reboot it.
4) After you Drobo has restarted use a file browser to navigate to the DroboApps/Rsync/ directory and using a plain text editor (such as notepad or wordpad) open the rsyncd.conf file and under the [Drobo0] entry replace all entries with the following and save the file:
path = /mnt/DroboShares/Drobo
comment = Drobo Share
read only = false

[Note: we assume here that your main Drobo share is called "Drobo", which is the default name given to it by the Drobo client software.]

5) Now launch BackupAssist and create a new backup job with the Rsync component (File -> New Backup Job -> Rsync).
6) On the destination step of the Rsync setup enter the follow data replacing droboshare with the IP of your DroboShare and clicking Ignore when prompted for a username and password.

When choosing the path to backup, make sure that you create the path on the Drobo first (eg. through Windows Explorer), as BackupAssist will assume that the base path already exists.

This will now have set up your Drobo as an Rsync Daemon server.

Hi all,

Today we released beta3 of our Rsync engine – which allows you to easily run Rsync on Windows. This will most likely be the final beta, and there are the following enhancements:

New in this beta release:
- Option to use Cygwin 1.7 – which provides long filename support in Windows (>253 characters)
- Bandwidth throttling – to limit the data transfer rate
- Optimise for local backup option – which should be used on LANs – turns off checksum calculations for where bandwidth is not the limiting factor
- Set permissions on the backup – allows you to specify whether you want to allow read and/or write permissions for all usres at your backup data host. We’ve found that write permissions are useful for when you need to use the backup as your “working data set” in case of disaster.

In other news, we managed to get our Rsync engine working with the Drobo NAS (www.Drobo.com) which is great for anyone looking for a turn-key internet backup solution! I’ll blog about this very very shortly.

I’ve also been working on a Rsync-on-Windows distribution that makes it easy to setup a Windows box as an Rsync Server, and that should be available before the end of this year.

Awesome!

Hi all,

I’ve had a few questions recently about BackupAssist running on Windows Server 2008 Core. After some experimentation, I managed to get it all working and it was successfully running image backups and sending me email notifications. (I haven’t yet tested the file replication, SQL or Rsync backups yet.) The only thing I’ve noticed so far is that you can only read the backup reports as plain text, not HTML (because IE isn’t installed on Server Core). The HTML Email notification works just fine.

However, the prerequisite install process is a bit different to normal OSs, and the current installer won’t work… so unfortunately you can’t run it on Server Core just yet.

BUT now that we know that it’s possible, and we know the procedure to get it working, we will be putting together another package. It looks at this stage that it will need to be a separate download, which unfortunately breaks our objective of one download for all products. However, there’s really nothing we can do about that because Server Core is just so different! [To be honest, we're lucky that it worked at all]

I hope to be able to give everyone more good news in the near term future. An installer is on the way! Wouldn’t that be a nice Christmas present?

Regards,

Linus

Hi all,

Today we’re proud to launch our new website, Windows Server Backup Resource Center, ortherwise known as wbadmin.info.

This site contains several articles that I wrote on Windows Server 2008 backup and as I get time, I’ll be contributing more content to the site.

The site also contains a search engine that we developed in-house to index the Microsoft KB and Technet articles, and forum posts, that relate to wbadmin.exe. We did this because it’s notoriously difficult to find information on the Microsoft website as it’s so scattered.

I hope everyone finds it to be a useful service!

Regards,

Linus