Backup Engine Support

Old - Version 3

New - Version 4

Support for NTBackup on Windows 2000 and later.
Discontinued support for NTBackup on NT 4.0
Support for ZIP64 (including media spanning, AES256 encryption) - in development
Support for advanced SQL backups (including 15 minute incrementals and point in time restoration) - in development
Planned: Rsync support for bit-level incremental file synchronization over networks - coming soon
Planned: File copy support (preserving security, etc)
Planned: Mailbox level Exchange backup
Planned: Sharepoint backup
Imaging support in Longhorn and Vista - waiting for Microsoft's final beta.

New Pluggable Engine Support

Version 4 is designed with a new architecture that enables plug-ins to be written for different backup engines.
This makes BackupAssist far more versatile, with many engines planned (see above).

Retain support for NTBackup on Windows 2000 and later
NEW: automatically detect popup windows and eliminate them.
NEW: real-time monitoring of backup progress (see Realtime Monitoring section)
NEW: automatically detect NTBackup error messages in the backup log, and provide troubleshooting links on the BackupAssist website to aid in solving problems

NEW: allow users to ZIP up files
ZIP 64 format overcomes the 4 gig file limit that was present in the original ZIP specification
AES256 strong encryption
Media spanning - makes it suitable for burning DVDs, with planned support for robotic DVD burners (eg. Primera)
Multi-threaded design outperforms WinZIP on multiple-processor servers
Preserve security information (ACLs, etc) when ZIPping and restoring files
Backup files are fully compatible for restoration with WinZIP, PKZIP, TugZIP, etc.
Still in development. Hope for a v4.0 release, but may be pushed back to v4.1.

Use ADO to connect to SQL Servers instead of osql.exe (in v3)
Perform full, differential or incremental backups according to a backup strategy
One-click disaster recovery to completely rebuild a SQL Server from backups
Point in time restoration for critical databases