Welcome to the BackupAssist Blog

Earlier in the year we put out a series on using Rsync with BackupAssist. Soon afterwards we launched v7. We realized that there were some slight changes in the process with v7 so we re-recorded the videos that weren’t current anymore.

How To Uninstall Rsync Programs is part of our videos lessons teaching you how to set up a successful Rsync Backup. By the end of this lesson, you will know how to uninstall CopSSH and cwRsyncServer.

Seeding Your Rsync Server is the fifth of five video lessons teaching you how to set up a successful Rsync Backup. Watch how a basic Rsync setup can solve your off-site backup requirements.

This is the last from our series demonstrating how to use Rsync alongside BackupAssist and we hope you have found them helpful. Make sure you stay tuned for more like these in the future.

Setup a Rsync Client is the fourth of five video lessons teaching you how to set up a successful Rsync Backup. Watch how a basic Rsync setup can solve your off-site backup requirements.

Tomorrow we will release the fifth and final video in this series, Seeding your Rsync Server .

Installing CopSSH and cwRsyncServer is the second of 5 video lessons teaching you how to set up a successful Rsync Backup.  By the end of this lesson, you will have a working RsyncServer ready to receive data.

Later this week we will also be releasing videos on; Activate a User Within CopSSH, Setup Rsync Client and Seeding your Rysncserver .

Basic Rysnc Backup overview is the first of 5 video lessons teaching you how to set up a successful Rsync Backup.  Watch how a basic Rsync setup can solve your off-site backup requirements.

Later this week we will also be releasing videos on; Installing CopSSH and cwRsyncServer, Activate a User Within CopSSH, Setup Rsync Client and Seeding your Rsyncserver .

Zen Software, the UK distributor of BackupAssist, has recently made some excellent blog postings about various aspects of BackupAssist. Please take time to check through them to see if the issues raised and solved will help you:

• Hyper-V Support Host vs Guests — February 10, 2012 — With Hyper-V backups, remember that it could well be the Guest machines that are the root of the problem even though the error is showing on the Host.
• BackupAssist Single Instance Store confusion — February 6, 2012 — Windows Explorer thinks more backup storage space is being used than is in reality being used because it doesn’t allow for the use of a Single Instance Store.
• Exchange mailbox backups with BackupAssist — February 1, 2012 — By utilising the BackupAssist Exchange Mailbox Add-on you can create an additional brick-level backup of all your users’ mailboxes and public folders and store them within standard Microsoft PST files. This makes it easy to recover just a single mailbox, or even specific emails.
• Rsync vs. file replication — which is best for your local backups? — January 27, 2012 — Cost and performance issues to consider which choosing which type of job to use when backing up files across a local network from one server to another.
• BackupAssist’s rsync ‘seed’ function explained — January 18, 2012 — Using the seed function, on a standard office Internet connection, administrators can see the first backup taking just a few hours rather than what could potentially have been a few days.

We’ve just released version 5.4.4 of BackupAssist.

This is a maintenance release that includes a number of fixes.

This release is especially important for users running the Hyper-V Granular restore console and Rsync Engine.

Minor fixes have also been made to the BackupAssist Restore Console, the Calendar options,  Media usage report and Exchange selection screens. Full release notes are available on our release history page.

To download the upgrade to v5.4.4 visit http://www.backupassist.com/BackupAssist/download.php#upgrade

If you experience any difficulties when upgrading please contact us at support@backupassist.com

With the advent of the Windows 7 release, we were recently made aware that the recommended Rsync server we listed on our downloads page does not support Windows 7.
After working with one of our customers, Mike Hoyle , he let us know that he has discovered an update to the cwRsync solution which functions in the Windows 7 environment.
I have included his correspondence below:

I may have found a solution to my problem as follows: -

I removed the original installation including services which was installed from the download on your website.

(cwRsyncServer_3.0.1_Installer.exe)

I went to the following site http://www.itefix.no/i2/download

Downloaded the latest cwRsync – cwRsyncServer_4.0.3_Installer.zip

and downloaded the latest Copssh – Copssh_3.0.3_Installer.zip

Installed cwRsync and then Copssh

Activated a new Copssh user – running the command ‘ssh localhost’ in the Unix shell now works.

I have managed 4 successful backups now to the Win 7 RSync Host. from backup assist v5.4.2

We would like to take the time to thank Mike for providing us with this information, and allowing us to share it so that this issue can be addressed.

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.