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

There’s much excitement here as we’re about to release our Rsync Engine, which will enable data to be synchronized offsite in a bandwidth efficient manner.

I’ve written up some findings on Rsync in terms of how it performs for typical Windows data, including Exchange Information Store backups and SQL database backups. You can see the results here:

Rsync presentation

[Note - this is actually an excerpt from my full presentation on Server 2008 backup, available here: http://www.backupassist.com/SBS/sbspresentation.html]

To illustrate the point, I created a 100MB uncompressible file (actually a TrueCrypt container). I then Rsynced it across to a data host. I then changed one byte of the file, somewhere in the middle, and then reran the Rsync job. These were the results:

Data backed up: 100.00 MB

Bandwidth efficiency report:
Files transferred: 0
Size of changed files: 0.00 B
Total bytes sent: 2.13 kB
Total bytes received: 26.00 B
Speedup factor: 47468.36

Fantastic - if one byte in the file changes, Rsync will only transmit the relevant changed block.

I then decided to insert 5 bytes at the start of the file. This means that the entire file is shifted right by 5 bytes. Normally, a block level incremental backup algorithm (like those found in drive imaging programs) will actually need to backup the entire file again because of the shift in data (every single block is affected). However, Rsync is correctly able to identify the shift. These are the results:

Data backed up: 100.00 MB

Bandwidth efficiency report:
Files transferred: 1
Size of changed files: 100.00 MB
Total bytes sent: 12.20 kB
Total bytes received: 70.05 kB
Speedup factor: 1245.06

So we see here that 70kB was received, and 12kB was sent. Most of this data would have been checksums to try to detect what part of the file changed. Still an outstanding result! 12kB sent compared to 100MB.

So overall, Rsync is quite simply a sound choice for bandwidth efficient block-level delta incremental data transfers.

We’ll be releasing our Rsync engine for Beta testing in the coming days. Stay tuned!

Hello world,

In our network, we have multiple servers and some of these are Virtual Machines. In order to back these up, we use a Disk-to-Disk and a Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape strategy, using BackupAssist v5.

Let’s look at how we do this.

Windows Server #1: SBS 2003 - This is our main server, domain controller, print and file server. We have three backup jobs:

1. Full backup to USB HDD - backing up the complete system, Exchange Server and mailboxes, file system to USB HDD
2. File Replication of the filesystem to Server 2 (Mirror mode) - to ensure that our file system is also backed up to an additional location
3. Rsync our file system to an offsite location

Windows Server #2: Windows Server 2003 - this is a VM host machine running the free VMware Server, and also has a DLT4 tape drive installed. We have two jobs running here:

1. File replication of our VM guests to a local disk - we do this by using the File Replication job in Mirror mode to mirror the entire directories of our VM guests to a separate internally installed hard drive.
2. Tape backup - backup the system partition, the mirror of the VMs (that were created by the previously described job), the mirror of the file system from Server 1, plus the backups of the VM guests (described later), to tape.

On Server 2, there are three VM guests:

1. Linux machine #1 - our source code repository - which is backed up as part of job #1 on the host, Server 2. We also have a scheduled rsync job that syncs the source code repository to an external site.
2. Linux machine #2 - our issue tracking system - which is backed up as part of job #1 on the host, Server 2. We also have a scheduled rsync job that syncs the database to an external site.
3. Windows Server #3 - our CRM system - which runs BackupAssist and does a filesystem backup and a SQL Server backup to the host, Windows Server #2. This is then picked up in the Tape job as previously described.

Notice that the 3 virtual machine guests do not need an internal system backup from within the guest because the host is backing up the entire guests, so a bare-metal restore would simply involve copying back the VM guests to a new server and running them from there.

When backing up the VM guests, we suspend the virtual machine to ensure that all data is flushed to disk. For more information about how to backup VM guests, please refer to this document: BackupAssist Usage Scenarios Guide

The next thing I’m going to investigate is whether it’s possible (and practical) to Rsync our guest VMs offsite. That means to say, as well as backing them up to tape, to have an additional job to sync them to a remote server via the Internet.

I’ll keep everyone posted on how it goes!

Regards,

Linus

Hi all,

To coincide with Microsoft’s worldwide launch of SBS 2008 and EBS 2008, we’d like to formally announce our support for these two latest operating systems.

The current version of BackupAssist (v5.0.5) supports these operating systems with the following features:
- Drive Image backups - building upon the block-level backup features present in Windows Server 2008, while adding extensive scheduling, strategy, hardware support, monitoring and reporting. For more details, visit Drive Imaging Fact Sheet
- File level backups - backup specific files and folders by replicating them to another location. Our Single Instance Store saves space and extends backup history, while intelligent differential backups make it very fast. For more details, visit
File Replication Fact Sheet

In addition, our next version 5.1, due in December, will also support:
- Internet based backups - by Rsyncing your files and folders via the Internet, using a bandwidth efficient transfer method
- EBS Administration Console plug-in - so you can view the results of jobs and perform basic administration through the EBS Administration Console.

Of course, all these features are in keeping with our philosophy of making straightforward backup solutions that are easy to use, manage and monitor, and “just work”.

So download and try BackupAssist today for a great backup experience!

Hi all,

I recently had a case where a client of ours was reporting that the backup was taking over 23 hours to complete, and it looked like it had “hung”.

However, he promptly fixed the issue himself, and discovered that it was due to the USB version setting in bios. I’ve quoted his reply to me below.

I thought it would be of interest to everyone else running HP Proliant servers!

Linus

Linus,

I have fixed the problem. It turns out that HP Proliant servers default to USB 1.1 ports for some LILO legacy stuff. I changed this in the bios of one of the two of my windows server 2008 servers and a 138GB backup now finished in 37 minutes. This is good for us as it is much better than 23 hours.