BackupAssist Classic v15

BackupAssist Classic v15.0.5

Maintenance release

Released October 14^th, 2026

Changes to existing behavior

• BackupAssist now starts services that VSS depends on before taking a snapshot, including SQL Server instances, Hyper-V management, WMI, BITS, and MSDTC. This helps prevent backups that fail or stall because a service they need was stopped, and it lets the VSS writers for those components supply their data, so the components are backed up properly. Services are started only. They are never stopped or restarted. If a service is not installed or cannot be started, BackupAssist continues without failing the backup.
• The minimum number of backups to keep for a System Protection job can now be set to 2. Existing jobs are unchanged.

New and improved

• Cloud Backup
  • The grandfather-father-son (GFS) backup scheme now includes an optional “Limit years of backups to keep” setting, allowing backups older than the set number of years to be removed automatically to help control long-term cloud storage growth.
  • Improved the prompt shown when a selected cloud container already has immutability enabled. It now explains that job-level immutability must also be enabled, provides an “Enable Now” option, and links to the relevant help.
• CryptoSafeGuard
  • Added an “Excluded guests” setting to the CryptoSafeGuard scanner’s Advanced tab, so Hyper-V guests can be excluded from a scan by name.
• Licensing
  • Simplified the “Enter license keys” dialog with a single input field and a list of previously deactivated keys, making reactivation easier.
  • License key deactivation is now performed directly from the Licensing window, and the licensing layout has been streamlined.
  • Added a “Reset licensing” tool to Troubleshooting tools. It clears activation keys and the Managed Backup Console (MBC) registration, then restarts the console, for when a clean licensing state is required.
• System Protection and Cloud Backup
  • Added a report warning when a recovered restore point is degraded and holds best-effort data for a small number of files.
  • Improved reporting when VSS-related services are in an inconsistent state, and improved handling when a VSS shadow copy cannot be deleted.
• Backup reports
  • The Hyper-V section of backup reports now notes that guests using dynamic disk configurations cannot be restored using granular restore.
  • The Recovery and Restore sections now use consistent availability indicators, including “Available”, “Yes”, and “No”.

Important fixes

• System Protection
  • Improved recovery from interrupted reverse-incremental merges. BackupAssist can now recover the backup chain after interruptions such as network or NAS connectivity loss, avoiding an unnecessary re-seed where recovery is possible. If the chain cannot be repaired, the report provides guidance for verifying restore points and re-seeding the job.
  • Fixed several issues following recovery from an interrupted backup, including failures caused by reverted revisions, unused VSS shadow copies being left behind, misleading report messages, and incorrect rollback behavior on encrypted destinations.
  • Improved reporting for reverse-incremental merge failures (BA6997), destination disk-full conditions, and successful backups that incorrectly showed warnings.
  • Fixed intermittent BA6124 failures when Windows temporarily reports an encrypted volume’s mount point as unassigned under heavy I/O.
  • Fixed an incremental backup index-verification failure caused by a used-block count mismatch after source-volume changes.
• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
  • Fixed an issue where BackupAssist could hang when a VSS writer or service was unresponsive, suspended, or deadlocked. Affected operations now fail with a VSS error within a defined timeout, and running backups can be canceled.
  • Improved error reporting when the VSS writer infrastructure is unavailable (BA617) or Windows is awaiting a reboot (BA618). Reports now identify VSS as the cause or indicate when a reboot is required, instead of a generic unhandled exception (BA1) or VSS provider veto error (BA904).
  • Improved handling of unavailable VSS-related services and writers, including SQL Server, Hyper-V, WMI, BITS, and MSDTC. Backups can continue where appropriate, with unavailable writers reported clearly.
• Cloud Backup
  • Fixed an issue where a cloud backup could hang and never complete. Stalled cloud backups are now detected and canceled within 2 hours rather than taking up to 12 hours.
  • Improved handling of previously corrupted backups in a cloud container. Affected data is detected earlier with a clearer error instead of causing a later “chunk not found” failure.
  • Fixed an issue where immutable AWS backups could fail with BA7008 (“Unable to finalize the cloud backup”) when the IAM policy did not include the s3:GetBucketVersioning permission.
  • Fixed reporting issues that could make an otherwise successful job report as failed (BA7043) during unused-chunk cleanup, or show an End Time earlier than the Start Time.
• File Protection
  • Improved handling and reporting of source read and destination write failures, ensuring file-copy errors affect the final job outcome and backup-size reporting remains accurate.
  • Fixed an issue where a File Protection job could continue running indefinitely when the destination ran out of disk space.
• File Archiving
  • Fixed an issue where files with non-ASCII names were stored in the archive with their characters replaced by question marks, so Test Restore reported them as not found in the backup. This affected Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic, and emoji characters.
• SQL Server backup
  • Fixed an issue where SQL Server backup jobs hung while calculating backup size on slow or unresponsive network destinations.
• CryptoSafeGuard
  • Fixed CryptoSafeGuard scans failing, sometimes along with the backup, on unexpected data such as invalid NTFS file records or scan results saved by an older version. Corrupt or ransomware-encrypted image files are now flagged as suspicious.
• Restore and recovery
  • Improved error reporting when an encrypted backup cannot be decrypted because its encryption key is missing, unreadable, incorrect, or corrupted.
  • Improved test restore behavior when a backup destination becomes unavailable or changes during verification. Test restore now fails promptly, provides a clearer explanation, and reports accurate file counts.
• Backup reports
  • Fixed an issue where reports and email notifications could show a successful or warning outcome when the backup executor stopped or crashed after the report was generated. The report, the email, and the Reports list now show the failed outcome.
  • Corrected several missing or inaccurate report values, including licensing status, backup size, operating system information, unmounted system volumes, and media usage below 1%.
• Console and interface
  • Improved console stability in several scenarios, including service interruptions, cryptographic service delays, operations performed while the service is under load, and unexpected events during startup or job completion.
  • Fixed an issue where backup jobs could disappear from the job list when a system or configuration error prevented them from loading during service startup. BackupAssist now identifies affected jobs so the problem can be investigated and loading retried.
• Live monitor
  • Fixed an issue where the running-time counter and progress fields could stop updating during phases such as VSS snapshot setup, even though the backup was still running.
• Notifications
  • Fixed an issue where Office 365 email notifications stopped being sent and new Office 365 authorizations could not be created when using the built-in Office 365 option.

Other fixes

• Fixed an issue where cloud backup data was held in immutable storage for up to 10 days longer than necessary.
• Improved File Archiving reporting for source disk read errors so the appropriate disk I/O error BA4020 is shown instead of BA4016 (unspecified ZipEngine exception).
• Fixed an issue where a Legacy System Protection backup to a Data container destination failed to mount, when its volume was already mounted under a different path.
• Fixed an issue where Hyper-V guests set to be excluded from a CryptoSafeGuard scan still had their virtual hard disks mounted and scanned. Guest partitions that cannot be mounted, such as unreadable Linux file systems, are now logged as warnings rather than errors.
• Fixed an issue where test restore reports could omit verification results when a file path, job name, or label contained an ampersand.
• Fixed an issue where searches across backups, including common wildcard searches, could return a database error instead of results.
• Fixed the exit prompt of the test restore wizard, and the SQL point-in-time restore wizard not closing after clicking Finish.
• Fixed an issue where backup reports could show placeholder text instead of job and system information when a backup could not start because another operation was already running.
• Fixed an issue where filtering View reports by a specific job could show only the five most recent reports even when “Display the last 500 reports” was selected.
• Fixed an issue where backups failed with BA2032 (licensing conflict), when a machine had both a perpetual Desktop product key and an MBC subscription active at the same time.
• Improved handling of conflicting license information restored from an older backup. BackupAssist now clears the stale MBC registration and returns the installation to an unregistered state.
• Fixed an issue where Add, Edit, and Delete controls could be missing from a backup job’s Exclusions tab, preventing file exclusions from being managed.
• Improved the backup job wizard message explaining why bare metal recovery is unavailable, including when the Volume Shadow Copy service is disabled.
• Fixed a help icon beside the backup account recommendation that did not respond when clicked.
• Fixed an issue where the CryptoSafeGuard manual scan job could appear in the Manage backup jobs dropdown and show an error when selected.
• Fixed an issue where the live monitor could still show an unfinished step for a completed job, including a “Back up <volume>” step left at 0%.
• Fixed an issue where email report notifications could fail when a recipient’s display name was missing from saved settings.

BackupAssist Classic v15.0.4

Maintenance release

Released June 10^th, 2026

Enhancements

• Cloud Backup / Test Restore
  • Restores and Test Restore jobs for Cloud backups now support dynamic rate limiting with user-configurable limits, matching the controls available for backup jobs
  • Improved Test Restore UI by removing references to Backup jobs
  • Test Restore reports now include the “tested size” information
• VM Instant Boot
  • Fixed an issue where VMInstantBootUI.exe could fail to launch when started from a network location
  • Added a loading screen to the VM Instant Boot UI so users receive visual feedback while the application is starting
• Backup job configuration
  • The Exclusions tab now warns users when System Protection or VSS-aware applications (such as Exchange, SQL Server, Hyper-V) are selected, clarifying that critical application files will still be backed up even if exclusions are configured
  • Added validation to prevent new backup jobs from using invalid job names or destination paths containing trailing dots or spaces
• System and Volume backup to local
  • Added an optional retry setting for local destinations to improve reliability when backing up to unstable or problematic hardware devices
• Reporting / Upgrade improvements
  • Removed incorrect Hyper-V Granular restore references from tape backup reports
  • Improved migration of MBC registration information after a major version upgrade

Fixes

• System backup to local (System protection)
  • Fixed a bug where incremental backups could fail with “Error in NTFS lib: UpdateId failed to compute” for files spanning multiple NTFS File Record Segments
• File and System backup (System protection, File protection, Cloud backup)
  • Fixed a regression introduced in 15.0.3, where backup jobs could hang indefinitely at the “Compile Usage Report” step when the destination is a NAS share
  • Fixed a rare crash (BA5 “backup unexpectedly terminated”) that could occur when a file path containing characters illegal in XML (such as certain NTFS filenames) appeared in a backup error message during serialization.
• File and System backup to cloud (Cloud backup)
  • Fixed a failed backup issue for immutable jobs upgraded from the beta version 14.0.5, in cases where the initial backup was run to a bucket without a default Compliance retention policy.
• File backup to local (File protection)
  • Fixed a regression issue introduced in 15.0.2, where backup jobs targeting directories with trailing dots or spaces in their name e.g. “E:\Backup Directory.\” lost Single instance store deduplication support after upgrading to 15.0.2 or 15.0.3; new jobs now also validate that the job name and backup destination do not contain trailing dots or spaces
• Legacy system protection
  • Fixed an issue where a Legacy backup could hang indefinitely if a VSS writer on the system became unresponsive (e.g. after a Windows or SQL Server update). The backup will now either complete normally or fail with an error instead of freezing.
  • Fixed the Backup Size value in reports for RDX destinations.
  • Fixed an issue where a Legacy SP backup to a BitLocker destination with an unreadable encryption password showed a misleading ‘Unable to copy file catalogue’ error instead of a clear password configuration error.

BackupAssist Classic v15.0.3

Maintenance release

Released May 5^th, 2026

Important Fixes

• RDX Backup Encryption Fix: Resolved an issue where RDX destination backups were not being encrypted when encryption was enabled.
• Improved Handling of Space-Dot Path Syntax: Files and folders with invalid “Space-Dot” naming syntax are now backed up by default.
  • A warning is displayed when such items are detected
  • Warnings can be suppressed per job using the new “Ignore the Space-Dot path syntax warnings” option in Job Settings

Backup & Restore

• Fixed an issue where Test Restore for cloud backups could fail to respect specified time limits
• Fixed granular file recovery from Hyper-V backups stored on iSCSI destinations using legacy System Protection
• Corrected Backup Size reporting for RDX backups using the new System Protection
• Fixed backup catalog generation issues that could prevent restores in rare cases when network paths were deselected
• Resolved an issue where some backup reports were missing after major upgrade migrations

System & Configuration

• Fixed a bug where VSS mode settings could be incorrectly applied during certain job creation/edit sequences
• Fixed an issue where required network path components could be incorrectly included in BMR selections for new System Protection backups

File Archiving

• Fixed a rare issue with ZIP file headers in File Archiving backups that could prevent use with external tools (e.g., 7-Zip)

Security (CryptoSafeGuard)

• Fixed an issue preventing whitelisting of suspicious files with unknown content

Enhancements – Cloud & Integrations

• Updated Wasabi and AWS S3 region lists to include new and revised regions for new buckets

Enhancements – Security (CryptoSafeGuard)

• Added support for wildcards in whitelist paths, allowing rules across any guest. Example: %GUESTVOLUME%\BAC\dummy.rbs

Enhancements – Licensing & Notifications

• License popup now displays BackupCare expiry date
• UI now alerts users if a license has not automatically activated after a major version upgrade

Enhancements – Recovery & Diagnostics

• Improved the Support button in Lifeline Recovery (RecoverAssist) for better diagnostics collection

BackupAssist Classic v15.0.2

Maintenance release

Released March 31^st, 2026

This is an important maintenance release for users running Cloud Backups on version 15.0.0 and 15.0.1, including fixes to keep data usage in cloud buckets/containers as low as possible.

Important: we highly recommend enabling the automatic rate limiting functionality in your cloud jobs if you haven't already done so. You can enable this by setting the "Maximum number of requests per second" to 300 for both GET and PUT in the "Cloud options" tab. This feature will make backups more resilient and speed them up as well, by smoothing out the requests and avoiding throttling issues from the provider.

Cloud Backup – cleanup step

• Garbage collection (deletion of unused data chunks from the container) has been completely reworked with fixes and major performance improvements, especially for immutable backups.
• Major fix to avoid a bug where large data deletions/changes could cause garbage collection to stop working on an ongoing basis, increasing the storage requirements in the cloud provider.
• The “Perform cleanup” step of the backup where garbage collection happens is now limited to run for no more than one quarter of the backup length for large backup jobs.
• Users can skip out of “Perform cleanup” if there is a need to run other jobs, or to reboot the machine for maintenance.
• NOTE: if your job was affected by the garbage collection bug above, the first few backups may run a longer cleanup step than usual, in order to remove extraneous unused data from the backup container.

Cloud Backup – performance

• The performance of Cloud Backups to S3-compatible destinations hosted on relatively low-powered hardware has been improved dramatically (eg. QNAP QuObjects)
  • Note that our Cloud Immutability feature has not yet been confirmed as supported on NAS-device-hosted S3-compatible systems.
• The performance of immutable backups has also been further improved, and immutable backups no longer create the additional short-lived object chunks that were introduced in 15.0.1

Discovery and recovery – all backups

• A discovered catalog for any backup type will now retain the discover-from location (and access details) as the default for the respective backup.
  • This is a change from previous Classic versions where after discovering a backup catalog from a new location, the discovered catalog would still use the original location as the default.
• Importantly, this change allows recovery from Cloud Backups in all cases where the access keys or container names have changed, eg. if the container has been copied.
  • Note that the backups must be rediscovered to take advantage of the fix.
  • Also note that recovery from replicated containers for immutable backups is not yet implemented.
• Restore and recovery is now supported for Wasabi Covert Copy Buckets.

Other fixes

• Fixed a rare crash issue in after Cloud Backup completion or cancellation.
• Fixed a rare issue where Cloud Backups could fail with a “Stream was not readable” error.
• Fixed an issue which prevented System backups to the MEGA S4 cloud provider.
• Fixed an issue for file backups to local/NAS (File Protection) that caused backups to fail without retries on some kinds of “invalid handle” error.
• Fixed manual CryptoSafeGuard scan jobs for mapped network drives (SMB shares mapped as drive letters)
• Fixed a bug where user-defined limits for time or percentage on Test Restore jobs for File Archiving are ignored.
• Fixed handling of further invalid syntax paths where file or folder names begin or end with space or period “.” characters, for backups to cloud (Cloud Backup), non-system backups (File Protection), and File Archiving jobs.

BackupAssist Classic v15.0.1

Maintenance release

Released February 17^th, 2026

Cloud Backup

• Detect and suggest the use of immutable option for Cloud Backups when the container has immutability configured
• Immutability - fix bug which doesn't extend the lock as needed on data for files that haven't changed
• Fixed performance issue where for some jobs the incremental backup ignores the existence of previous backups during processing (though data is not reuploaded if it already exists)
• Add support for Impossible Cloud and other providers that do not support the get-acl-bucket command
• Add support for iDrive E2 non-immutable containers with "Default Encryption" enabled
• Allow periods (full stops) within AWS bucket names
• Add support for QNAP QuObjects and other providers that do not support the ListObjectVersions API
• Fixed an issue for immutable jobs to Azure where incremental backups can fail with error: “BA7000 Cloud backup incorrect password” due to unexpected data in the response from Azure
• Fixed a restore issue for iDrive E2 immutable backups when all objects are in “deleted” state (previously unexpected error response)

Other fixes

• Prevented unnecessary extra files from being generated in the Windows MachineKeys directory
• Fixed a rare issue where the console UI can hang when it remains opened for a few days
• Fixed a rare hang when running a Test Restore job
• Fixed a rare issue where file restore can fail for some specific files with error “Path not found in backup"

VM Instant Boot

• Fixed processing for backups on mapped network paths
• Added cancellation support for the "Create Instant Boot" function in the VM Instant Boot UI
• Improved some minor issues in the UI

Other UI changes

• Fixed broken default and "Start time" sorting on the Reports page
• Improvements to the left hand navigation in the UI, more consistency with capitalisation
• Improve UI flow consistency in the New backup and New test restore sequences
• Fixed some inconsistencies in the selections UI behavior, including regarding the use of checkboxes, VSS warning display, and the VSS mode options
• The temporary encrypted volume created by a running System Protection job is now hidden from the selection screen
• Fixed bug where the last completed job result is sometimes not shown for a job in the "Last 5 backups" item at the bottom of the Job list / Overview

BackupAssist Classic v15.0.0

Released November 6^th, 2025

NEW Cloud Immutability

• Immutable backups in the cloud (WORM).
• The best offsite backup protection from accidental and malicious corruption.
• Backups are locked for the user-specified retention period and then removed.
• BackupAssist manages the cloud object retention period, so no additional cloud storage cost will be incurred by enabling immutability.
• Seamless discovery and restore from backups, even when the cloud bucket/container data appears to have been corrupted.
• Supports:
  • Object Lock on AWS S3 and S3-compatible providers.
  • Immutable Storage on Azure.

NEW All New user experience

• Intuitive first-time user experience
• Streamlined operation for existing users
• Improved feature discovery and navigation
• Simplified job creation

NEW VM Instant Boot UI

• Quickly get your backed-up system up and running as a Hyper-V guest, using this new UI to create and manage the boot files that are needed.
• The virtual disks created by the VM Instant Boot UI application can be immediately attached to a new Hyper-V guest and started. This process with will not affect the underlying backup, keeping its integrity intact.
• Works with both local system / volume backups as well as downloaded system backups from a cloud storage.

Improved Cloud stability and performance

• Automatic request rate management enabled by default for new cloud jobs
• Reduce rates based on provider requests and errors
• Increase rates again when conditions are suitable
• User-configurable limits on request rates
• Improved stability and consistent performance

Improved Advanced imaging engine

• Added cancellation support to the NTFS optimization backup stage (0% on incremental backup)
• Fixed a bug in the low-level NTFS optimization routine where NTFS errors on a volume caused it to hang at 0%.
• Fixed a hang in the low-level NTFS optimization routine which can happen when the destination is not reachable

Cloud Backup:

• Fixed backup of files that were being skipped due to having a zero-size backup stream (skipped file warnings)

• Provider S3 API requests are identified as “app/CortexIT-<info>”

Other enhancements:

• Backups: Fixed regression which prevented concurrent job execution (zip) or multiple different jobs from being backed up/restored simultaneously
• Restores: Streamlined entry of the encryption password during restores
• Scanning: Updated the 7zip library to fix bugs and improve detection routines
• Settings Export/Import: fixed issues related to exporting and importing encrypted jobs
• UI: Improved product differentiation for BackupAssist Desktop vs Classic
• UI: Added “days of week” to run backups into the job creation wizard
• Licensing: Fixed missing license expiry warnings for BackupAssist Desktop (via product key)
• Licensing: Improved workstation OS detection routines to handle some OS corruptions

Feature removal:

• WebDAV (not recommended) is no longer available by default
• Deprecated cloud seeding functionality and the “quick” job wizard
• Deprecated Exchange Granular Restore (EOL)