Hello,

I’m Michael, one of the BackupAssist Support team

Recently a customer wanted to have a remotely shared Rev drive cartridge to
eject after the backup was complete. Since this was a remote share, the
standard eject check box is not an option.

The solution was to use the freeeject program available at www.freeeject.com.

FreeEject is a free, removable media ejecting utility that can be executed from the command line.

After mapping the Rev drive to G:, we simply defined a post job script and inserted the following command: Freeeject G:

Hello,

I’m Michael, one of the BackupAssist US Support team members.
We get several calls and e-mails a week from customer having problems
verifying their license details when ordering a Version 4 upgrade.

When entering your Version 3 to Version 4 upgrade order, ensure you enter the license details exactly as they appear in the BackupAssist registration details. To view your current license details, select help from the BackupAssist console and select Enter registration details.

Usually an upgrade will fail to validate because a period or comma was inadvertently left out.

For example:

Wilmington City Sch was entered as an organizational name when the actual name was Wilmington City Sch. (There should of been a period after Sch)

The license details are not case sensitive, but leaving out any letter or special character will cause the verification process to fail.

One last point, make sure your organization type is also correct. This can be viewed by selecting the BackupAssist Navigator from the BackupAssist console and pressing the information button. The organizational type is listed by the License type field.

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.

Hi All,

This is Raj from the BackupAssist support team .

As you may already know, the latest release of BackupAssist (Version 4.1) was officially released last week.

While this latest update received the stamp of approval from the majority of our client base, there were 4 clients who encountered some issues.

Looking into their issues, it was basically clear that we had a minor bug in the latest release that affected clients running on 64-bit machines, who were specifically backing up their data to a CD / DVD device or external hard disks.

Jason and Justin from our development team looked into the issue and they found that the cause of this problem was a faulty .dll file.

To address this issue, we uploaded an updated copy of Version 4.1 on our website today that contains the correct .dll.

However, if you are running BackupAssist V4.1 on a 64-bit machine and you encounter any similar issues, please follow the steps below to troubleshoot the error:-

- The easiest step is to email our support team and we’ll reply back with the correct .dll file as an email attachment. You can then copy this .dll to the BackupAssist install directory.

- The other option is to un-install the software completely, ensuring that the BackupAssist install directory (for example:- C:\Program Files\BackupAssist V4) is also deleted from the machine. Once all the traces of BackupAssist have been removed from your machine, you can visit: http://www.backupassist.com/BackupAssist/download.php and download Version 4.1 once again.

I hope the above suggestions help to fix any issues you may encounter.

On behalf of the BackupAssist team, I’d like to apologise to all our clients who encountered this issue.

Until my next post….. Good Bye!!!!!

Yesterday, an unfortunate thing happened. After a reboot of our server (that was combined with the installation of some Windows updates), our Exchange Information Store became corrupt.

(Note: In our company, we use Exchange for internal company emails. All emails that go to our backupassist.com email addresses are hosted externally, so thankfully this Exchange corruption didn’t affect our helpdesk and tech support team.)

To compound matters, our staff member who is also our system administrator has been sick for nearly 3 months, so it was left to me (a developer!) to get our Exchange Server going again.

It took a few attempts, but thankfully having a good backup (made by BackupAssist!) saved the day.

The symptoms were these:

Every minute, this event is logged:

- Event ID 9175, Source MSExchangeSA, Category MAPI Session, Message: The MAPI call ‘OpenMsgStore’ failed with the following error:
The Microsoft Exchange Server computer is not available. Either there are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server computer is down for maintenance.

When the Exchange Information Store service is started, this is logged:

- Event ID 9518, Source MSExchangeIS, Gategory General, Message: Error Read verification error starting Storage Group /DC=local/DC=CortexIT/CN=Configuration/CN=Services/CN=Microsoft Exchange/CN=CORTEXIT/CN=Administrative Groups/CN=first administrative group/CN=Servers/CN=GERSHWIN/CN=InformationStore/CN=First Storage Group on the Microsoft Exchange Information Store.
Storage Group - Initialization of Jet failed.
- Event ID 419, Source ESE, Category: Logging/Recovery, Message: Information Store (1220) First Storage Group: Unable to read page 457774 of database G:\ExchSvr\MDBDATA\priv1.edb. Error -1018.
- Event ID 454, Source ESE, Category: Logging/Recovery, Message: Information Store (1220) First Storage Group: Database recovery/restore failed with unexpected error -1018.

[And several more such logs]

And from within Exchange System Manager, the stores simply wouldn’t mount. There was no real error message.

The first thing I did was to make a copy of the MDBDATA directory. When doing any work to the Exchange database files, ALWAYS MAKE A COPY BEFORE YOU START!

Then I found some instructions on using eseutil to repair the databases - and I ran through them and ESEUTIL claimed it had fixed the problem. The instructions are found here: http://www.mike-tech.com/article.php?gif=exchange2k3&article=304

However, the mount of the database still wouldn’t work, with more of the same errors.

After more Googling and trying other things, I found this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/264228/en-us

Okay, so it points to missing database files, where the solution is to put them back where they belong. mmmmmm… Or the other solution is to run eseutil /r. Which I did - and it didn’t work either.

A similar article is also found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb498209(EXCHG.80).aspx

Then I took another copy of the MDBDATA directory, and decided to do a full restore from the last full backup - which was done the night before. So in the worst case scenario, we’d lose one day of emails - which for us, is fine. I could then look at the log files later.

So after doing a full restore, and following the brilliant instructions in our white paper which I’d written a few years prior (available here http://www.backupassist.com/downloads/whitepapers/ExchangeMailboxBackup_WP.pdf), I was all set! Or so I thought…

The blasted Information Store still wouldn’t mount!

Argh - how could this be??? A full backup wouldn’t mount?

After some thought, I deduced that the problem was that when the Information Store service starts, it automatically tries to use the log files to bring the database “up to date”. And it’s most likely that the log files were corrupt.

So I deleted the two *.log files [E00.log and E00xxxxxx.log] and did another full restore.

And hey presto! The mailbox store mounted successfully!

Now, did we lose any emails, given that we restored from the previous night’s backup? Well, in actual fact, no. We use Outlook in Cached Exchange mode so all the emails sent and received during the day were cached. And to my surprise, when we connected Outlook back to the Exchange Server and it synchronised, it did NOT delete the emails that were only in the OST file but not on Exchange. Having said that, those emails weren’t pushed back to the Exchange Server either. For us, this situation was acceptable.

So the total time taken to do this was about 1 hr 30 mins. Of that time, about 1 hr 15 mins was spent pursuing the eseutil database repair options… another 10 minutes figuring out that I had to delete the *.log files, and 5 minutes actually doing the restore.

The magic is knowing what to do… so I hope this information will be of benefit to other poor souls who suffer the same fate!

And remember – always backup! Thanks BackupAssist!

Hi all,

This is Raj from the BackupAssist Support team with my first post on our blogs - I hope you find my post useful.

Yesterday I had this very interesting task of assisting one of our clients who was looking to backup a remote SQL server, which was on a different domain and a different subnet.

While my initial gut feeling was to tell him ’sorry, not possible’, I thought of giving it a shot just in case.

The scenario was (example):-

Backup Server
Ip address - 192.168.1.x
Domain - Test

SQL server
Ip address - 192.168.4.x
Domain - Sample

Initially the backup server was able to detect the SQL databases, but the backup always failed in the ‘Checking Destination’ phase within our software.

We tried changing the backup destination from being the ‘backup server’ to the ’sql server’, but the same issues persisted.

Finally, with the help of Jason (our SQL expert from the Development team), we got around this issue by using a simple ‘pre-backup’ script within BackupAssist.

Example:- net use \\192.168.4.x\sqlbackup\sql\ /user:admin password,

where,
\\192.168.4.x\sqlbackup\sql\ - is the backup destination where the SQL backups are stored
admin and password - is the user name and password of the administrator user account in the ‘Sample’ domain.

Phew, all’s well that end’s well .

A long time ago, in April 04, we released v3 of BackupAssist. And we have enjoyed providing you support for v3 since then! When we released v4 last year, we said that we would discontinue support for v3 at the end of 2007. But since we love working with our users so much, we continued to answer questions, provide support and facilitate license key changes.

Now that v4 has been out for over a year, and with version 5 planned, we will be officially ceasing support for BackupAssist v3.x at the end of June 2008.

To help spread the word, please inform your system administrators or clients who are using BackupAssist v3.x of this notice.

We strongly encourage you to upgrade your version of BackupAssist as doing so will future-proof your backup system against new operating systems and environments.

If you’d like more information about the pricing for version 4, please visit: http://www.backupassist.com/purchasing/upgrade.php.

For more information about our EOL Policy and Announcement, visit http://www.backupassist.com/support/EndOfLife.html

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!

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