BackupAssist Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Generally, no. Products such as ArcServe and BackupExec™ can take control of your backup device (especially tape drives) by installing their own drivers for the device; and this means that they cannot be used by other applications, such as Windows Backup (NTBackup) or BackupAssist.

While we recommend uninstalling other backup software products from your system before installing BackupAssist, if this is not possible, we suggest that you install the latest Windows drivers for your backup hardware device. We also recommend that you temporarily stop any services associated with other backup software applications, as they may interfere with BackupAssist.

The number of licenses you need depends on your network environment and the resources you need to backup. Below is a list of what a single licensed installation of BackupAssist can and cannot backup. If you have a more complex environment, and need advice on how to best utilize BackupAssist, email us at . You may also like to read our Licensing Guidelines article for additional information.

A single licensed installation of BackupAssist can back up the following:

• Any number of remote or local Exchange Servers, with the following restrictions:
  

  	BackupAssist running on Server 2008 and 2008 R2	BackupAssist running on Server 2003
  Local Exchange information store backup	Yes	Yes Using the NTBackup engine (Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007 only).
  Remote Exchange information store backup	No To back up the Exchange information store of a remote server you need to install BackupAssist locally on the Exchange Server itself and purchase a separate BackupAssist license	Yes Using the NTBackup engine (Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007 only).
  Local Exchange mailbox backup*	Yes	Yes
  Remote Exchange mailbox backup*	Yes	Yes

  *Exchange mailbox backups require the Exchange Mailbox Add-on.
• Any number of local or remote* SQL Servers
  
  *Remote SQL servers require the SQL Server Add-on.
• Any number of remote or local files and program files
• Open files on the local machine (dependant on the Operating System; for more information see our Open Files White Paper)
• The local System State (includes Windows registry, COM+ database, boot files, Active Directory, system files, etc)
  

A single licensed installation of BackupAssist cannot back up:

• The System State of a remote machine
  

  To backup the System State of a remote machine you need to either install and license BackupAssist on each machine that you need to backup the System State of, or manually schedule NTBackup or Wbadmin (Windows Server 2008 Backup) to backup the System State of the machine to a local file, and use BackupAssist to backup this file to your intended backup device.

  For disaster recovery you do need a backup of your machine's System State. If you are running either Windows XP or Server 2003, we recommend that you perform regular ASR backups of your server, which allows for easy disaster recovery and system restoration. For more information read our Bare Metal ASR white paper. If you are running Vista or Windows Server 2008, a drive image backup of your system volume where Windows is installed will include the System State information and allow for disaster recovery.

• Open files (with exclusive locks) residing on remote machines
  

  Open file snapshot managers, like Microsoft VSS and the BackupAssist Open Files Add-on, cannot perform snapshots of network volumes, and therefore cannot be used to backup open files residing on a remote machine where BackupAssist is not installed.

  BackupAssist does offer Conventional File Copy to work around this limitation, but this will only backup open files without exclusive locks. For more information see our Open Files White Paper

No. V5 and v6 licenses will not activate on BackupAssist v7. To activate BackupAssist v7 you will need to upgrade your license to a v7 license. To upgrade visit our Purchasing page.

Yes. For machines without an internet connection you can export an activation file from BackupAssist, which can be copied to a machine that does have an internet connection. The activation file is uploaded to our website, and a return license key file will be issued that can be used on the machine running BackupAssist to activate your license key(s).

This process acts to ensure that a license key cannot be activated on multiple machines at the same time. To carry out the manual activation:

1. Click Help > Licensing from the top menu
2. Click Activate and input the license keys that you have purchased
3. Click Manual. You will then be asked where to save the activation file.
4. Copy the activation file from this path to a machine that has Internet access.
5. Visit http://www.backupassist.com/activatev5 on a machine with Internet access.
6. Browse for the activation file and then click Activate.
7. Right-click the link provided for the return license key and click Save Target As. Save the return license key file to a disk location that the machine running BackupAssist can access.
8. On the machine running BackupAssist, browse for the return license key file in the Load path field. If the window asking for the load path is no longer visible click Help > Licensing > Continue to manual activation.
9. Click Activate. The licensing screen will indicate which components of the software have been activated.

The major difference between BackupAssist and competing solutions (that typically cost 2-4 times as much), is the ease of use of our software and its affordability for small and medium sized businesses. Typically many of our customers choose our software simply because it is far easier to drive, while still offering all the features that are necessary for small and medium businesses.

Our philosophy is to make the software as simple to use as possible, and provide the essential features for comprehensive server backup, while leaving out the unnecessary bells and whistles that make other backup software more complex and more expensive.

BackupAssist gives you super-fast setup and scheduling, user-friendly interfaces, daily email reminders and email notifications - that are designed to significantly reduce the amount of time you spend managing your backups.

You may like to read our comprehensive Product Tour for a introduction to all of BackupAssist's capabilities, as well as view some of our customer testimonials to see what our users have to say.

There are a number of benefits and advantages that BackupAssist offers over the standard Windows Backup, including the following:

• No need to write scripts or batch files: this saves you time, effort, and reduces the possibility of errors.
• Implement an industry-standard backup scheme automatically using BackupAssist. We put the hard work in, so you won't have to devise a media rotation strategy yourself.
• If a backup fails, you'll know about it. The backup status emails give you the results of each backup, so you can see if anything went wrong with the backup at once. Scheduled jobs may be used to schedule a backup, but if it fails you are often given no warning at all.
• Minimize human error. Reminder emails can be sent to your secretary / office assistant to minimize the chances of human error in your backup strategy.
• Open file backup support automatically using BackupAssist.
• Additional backup engines and add-ons, such as File Replication for data mirroring and file history, BackupAssist for Rsync for bandwidth efficient Internet backup, the SQL Server Add-on for SQL database backup and restore, the Exchange mailbox Add-on for individual mailbox backup, and the BackupAssist VM Granular Restore Console Add-on for fast backup and easy restore of Hyper-V Servers and Guest VMs.

For more information about the advantages of using BackupAssist over Windows Backup and Windows Server Backup see our NTBackup and Windows Imaging product tour pages.

Yes. Depending on the backup engine you are using, you can customize your schedule to perform different types of backups, such as incremental and differential, on any given day within your backup schedule.

The different backup types available depend on the backup engine that the job was created with. Some engines, such as Windows Imaging, File Replication, Rsync and Exchange Mailbox have their own built-in "automatic" type of backup that cannot be modified. For example, Windows Imaging jobs start with a full backup, and then incremental backups from then on, with changes being merged into the original image; past versions of the images will appear as shadow copies within the main backup, and as the backup hard drive fills up, old versions will be automatically deleted. Engines like NTBackup and Zip, however, support the ability to schedule different types of backup, such as full, incremental and differential, on any day within your backup schedule.

To customize your backup schedule and modify the type of backup:

1. From the top menu click Edit and select your job from the list.
2. Click Scheduling from the left menu.
3. Click Customize schedule near the top-right side of the window.
4. For help with any of the settings click the help icon at the top-right of the window.

BackupAssist includes in-built integration with the Microsoft Windows Backup Utility (NTBackup) for backups to both disk-based and tape drive hardware devices. NTBackup is pre-installed with most versions of Windows (2000, XP, and 2003). With NTBackup, your backups will be stored in non-proprietary formats, and your data can restored on any Windows-based machine (2000, XP, and 2003) without needing additional software.

By integrating with infrastructure already built into Windows, BackupAssist can deliver features that are useful for small and medium organizations at a fraction of the cost of similar commercialized software products. Paying for research and development is a large part of why some backup software is so expensive; but BackupAssist doesn't just give you the right settings to make Windows Backup reliable, it actually adds features that turn BackupAssist into a full industry standard backup solution. To read more about the benefits BackupAssist adds to NTBackup, visit our NTBackup Product Tour page.

Please note: NTBackup is just one of the many backup engines that BackupAssist offers. BackupAssist also integrates with the Windows Server Backup (wbadmin) application on Windows Vista and Server 2008, and has its own unique backup engines such as File Replication, Rsync Internet Backup and Zip.

BackupAssist can backup a range of Windows applications and data, including:

Backup Type	Engines that can be used
Files and folders	NTBackup Windows Imaging File Replication Zip Rsync
VSS Applications (e.g. Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, or as any VSS-aware application that uses standard VSS restore methods)	Windows Imaging File Replication Zip Rsync
System State / Active Directory	NTBackup Windows Imaging File Replication Zip
Exchange information store	NTBackup Windows Imaging File Replication Zip Rsync
Exchange mailboxes	Exchange Mailbox Add-on You can also integrate Exchange mailbox backups in any File Replication, Zip, Rsync or Windows Imaging job.
SQL Server databases	SQL Server Add-on
Hyper-V Host/Guest	Windows Imaging Includes support for restoring individual files and folders using the BackupAssist VM Granular Restore Console

In previous versions of BackupAssist, system state was available during the creation of a backup job. The option to backup system state is now selected by editing a backup job after it has been created.

A system state backup contains some of the important files, registry values and settings that are used by the Windows operating system. It does NOT back up the operating system itself. This means a system state backup can be used to restore the settings your computer had at an earlier point in time, but it will not allow you to recover your computer. A system state backup can be helpful if your computer is encountering errors and you want to restore your settings to an earlier point in time, before the errors occurred.

Because Windows SystemState requires a functioning computer, and can only restore Windows settings, we recommended that a System Protection backup is used. A System Protection backup can restore a machine's system state data, and it can ALSO be used to perform a recovery of your computer, when used with a Windows recovery environment, like RecoverAssist

The level of open file support (OFS) provided in BackupAssist varies based on your operating system:

Full support - complete backup of open files, including all locked files, maintaining data consistency.

Basic support - open files locked with a shared lock or no lock are copied and backed up after the main backup. Files with an exclusive lock cannot be copied or backed up. Exclusively locked files are typically SQL Server or Exchange data files. Exchange Server information store backup (2000, 2003, 2007, 2010) is standard with BackupAssist. SQL Server can be backed up using our optional SQL Add-on module.

For more information about open file backups in BackupAssist see our Open Files Backup white paper.

The backup format depends on what backup engine was used to backup your data. BackupAssist provides a number of different backup engines. See the list below for the common backup formats associated with each backup engine.

Backup Engine	Backup Format
NTBackup	.BKF file or tape (standard Windows Backup, NTBackup format)
SQL	.BAK database backup file (standard Microsoft SQL database backup format)
Exchange Mailbox	.PST file (standard Microsoft Outlook format - can be opened with Outlook or imported with Microsoft ExMerge)
Windows Imaging	.VHD file (standard Windows Server Backup drive image format)
File Replication	Exact replica of your selected files and folders (can search for files within your backups, just like a normal file system).
Zip	Compressed archive in .ZIP format. The Zip engine also provides support for standalone tape drives.

How you restore depends on what backup engine was used to backup your data. Depending on what format your backup data is stored in, you will need to follow a different procedure for restoration. See below for a list of the common backup formats, and procedures for restore.

Backup Engine	Backup Format	Data Available For Restore	Restore Procedure
NTBackup	.BKF file or tape	- System State, files and folders - Exchange information store	Use Windows Backup (Start Menu > Run > NTBackup). Refer to the BackupAssist help file for more details.
SQL	.BAK database backup file	- Individual SQL databases - SQL disaster recovery	Use the SQL Restore Wizard built in to BackupAssist Refer to our SQL Addon white paper for more details.
Exchange Mailbox	.PST file	- Exchange mailboxes / public folders - Individual mailbox items (calendar, messages, etc)	Use the BackupAssist Restore Console to restore your Exchange mailboxes or public folder directly back into your Exchange Server. Alternatively, simply open your mailbox PST file with Outlook and drag-and-drop the relevant items to copy them back.
Windows Imaging *	.VHD file	- Files and folders - VSS applications - Drive volumes - Bare-metal restore - Exchange information store - System State	Use either the BackupAssist Restore Console or the Windows Server Backup/Restore application (wbadmin.exe). To restore the System State from an Image backup you will need to use Windows Server Backup. Refer to the BackupAssist help file for more details.
File Replication	Exact replica of your selected files and folders.	- Files and folders - System State - VSS applications	Simply copy the files back from your backup device to their original location or use the BackupAssist Restore Console to restore your System State, VSS Applications or files and folders.
Zip	Compressed archive of your selected files and folders in .ZIP format. The Zip engine also provides support for backing up to a standalone tape drive.	- Files and folders - System State - VSS applications	Use the BackupAssist Restore Console to restore data from either tape or disk. You can also open a .ZIP file stored on a disk location using any Windows-based application that supports the .ZIP format.
Rsync	Exact replica of your selected files and folders stored on your Rsync Host.	- Files and folders - VSS applications	Use the BackupAssist Restore Console.
Hyper-V Host backup via the Imaging Engine	One-pass image backup of Hyper-V Host (.VHD file)	- Entire Host - Guest VMs	Use Windows Server Backup or the BackupAssist Restore Console. You can also use the VM Granular Restore Console to restore individual files from a Guest VM.

Please note: restoration should be performed by qualified technical personnel.

Yes. During the last step of the backup job creation process you can prepare your backup media for use with BackupAssist (and you can also do this any time after installation within the BackupAssist console). You only need to prepare each backup media once.

The idea of a backup is being able to restore all your data while minimizing the possibility of data loss. When restoring from incremental or differential backups, you'll often require multiple tapes or disks as some backups will store only differences in files since the last backup. For example, to restore Wednesday's data, you may require Monday's backup, together with Tuesday's and Wednesday's backup. If Tuesday's backup is missing or destroyed, you'll be missing some data.

With full backups, each backup contains all the necessary data, so you can perform a complete restore from any tape or disk.

The best backup plan and rotation strategy depends on how much money you invest in backup media. The more tapes, external hdds, CD/DVDs, etc you have to rotate and backup to, the better protected you are against data loss. It is also best to perform Full backups daily of your data, rather than Incremental or Differential backups. Running Full backups ensures that you have a complete set of data on each backup tape, disk, drive, DVD, etc. This means that when it comes time to restore, even if some of your tapes or disks are lost or unreadable, you can still retrieve all of your data from the most recent working backup. If, on the other hand, you performed Incremental backups from Tuesday to Friday, you would need all 5 backup tapes or disks from the week to restore all of your data; and if the Full backup from the Monday was corrupt or unreadable you would only be able to restore files that had changed since Monday, and consequently not be able to retrieve much of your data.

All good rotation schemes should allow you to restore from the previous working day. It is sometimes the case, however, that data loss may not be detected for days or weeks. An effective rotation scheme should therefore also allow for restore of data that is weeks, or even months old. This is best achieved by archiving data to some of your backup media. Archived data is stored permanently and not overwritten. This means that at least once a month you should take one of your backup tapes, drives, DVDs, etc offsite and store it in a secure location for permanent archiving. That way, data will be available for many years to come.

Typically, the better protection a scheme provides the more backup media it requires. You can choose from a variety of backup schemes, depending on your requirements and the backup media you have available. The Grandfather-father-son scheme, for example, provides the best protection, but requires 20 separate backup tapes or disks, and as such, is the most costly to implement.

You may also even like to consider combining different backup strategies and backup media for an extra level of protection by scheduling multiple backup jobs that backup to different hardware devices. See our Common Usage Scenarios white paper for information about best backup practices.

In BackupAssist, each hardware media type has a different group of tailored rotation strategies, including a number of industry standard backup strategies that can be selected from and configured.

While the pre-defined rotation schemes cover the majority of backup scenarios and strategies, each scheme can be customized should you need to perform incremental or differential backups, and so on. The ability to customize each scheme gives you the flexibility of designing your own backup schedule and rotation strategy. Also see our Common Usage Scenarios white paper for information about best backup practices.

Yes. You can either run a job manually from within the BackupAssist console itself, or you can choose to create a desktop shortcut that can be double-clicked to start a backup.

To run a job manually from within the BackupAssist console:

1. From the top menu click Edit and select your job from the list.
2. Click Quick actions from the top menu and select Run now...

To create a desktop shortcut to run a job manually:

1. From the top menu click Edit and select your job from the list.
2. Click Quick actions from the top menu and select Add desktop shortcut. A BackupAssist job shortcut (eg. "Run JobName") should now be available on your desktop. Double-click the shortcut to run your backup job.
3. You can also suspend your job to prevent it from running automatically by going to Edit > select your job > click Overview on the left > and then Suspend under Job status.

This often indicates that the drive you are backing up to is formatted with a FAT file system. FAT has a limitation of a 4GB maximum file size. This means that if your backup file goes beyond this 4GB limit, no more data can be backed up and the backup terminates with an error (usually "End of media encountered").

To rectify this issue, you need to format your backup drive with the NTFS filesystem instead of FAT. NTFS does not have the 4GB file size limitation.

More details on NTFS vs FAT can be found here: http://www.theeldergeek.com/ntfs_or_fat32_file_system.htm

You can convert a filesystem from FAT to NTFS using the convert command. From a Windows command prompt (Start Menu > Run > cmd) type the following:

convert e: /FS:NTFS

Where e: is the drive letter of your backup device. You can also type convert /? for further help.

Yes. If you need to install the Advanced Open Files Addon after installing BackupAssist, carry out the following:

1. Go to Start Menu > Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs > select BackupAssist and click Change
2. Click Next, select Modify and then click Next.
3. You should now be able to choose to install the advanced open files addon.

Please note: once the advanced open files addon has been installed you will need to restart your machine.

If the tape drive detection process carried out by BackupAssist times-out before the Removable Storage Manager in Windows can connect to your tape drive, BackupAssist will fail to find your drive. If this is what is causing your issue you may find that running the detect sequence (click the Detect button when setting up your tape drive destination) twice will give the device enough time to be ready to communicate.

If this does not resolve the issue you can manually enter the device name and media pool of your tape drive into the available fields in BackupAssist. For instructions on where to find the values for your device and media pool settings visit http://www.backupassist.com/HTMLHelp/Tips_TapeSettings2000.htm

Basically, the following is all that is required to set up your drive:

1. Right-click My Computer > go to Manage
2. Removable Storage and then expand Libraries
3. Copy the name of the tape drive listed here into the Device name field in BackupAssist.
4. Copy the name of the media pool for the tape drive into the Media pool field.

You should now have no problems backing up to the tape drive in BackupAssist. If you still have issues, however, please contact us as follows:

1. Click the Contact support link at the bottom-left corner of the BackupAssist window and select Contact support.
2. Fill out the available form, ensuring that diagnostics check-box is enabled.

Often failed backups to a tape device can be caused by faulty or damaged tape drive hardware or tape media. If your tape backups continue to fail, we recommend trying the following:

1. Run a cleaning tape through the tape drive 3 to 5 times.
2. Run any tape drive diagnostic tools you may have - these should be available from the tape drive manufacturer - to test the validity of the drive.
3. Ensure that you have the latest drivers/firmware for your tape drive and controller devices (eg. SCSI card)
4. Check the cabling, SCSI termination, etc
5. Try a brand new tape if none of the above helps
6. Try either replacing the SCSI controller or have the tape drive serviced.

See our Compatibility Data Sheet for more information.

An Exchange Information Store backup is a full backup of the entire Storage Group to disk. This full backup can be used to fully restore your Exchange Server in the event of a disaster or system corruption. You may like read our Exchange Backup/Restore white paper for more details.

An Exchange Mailbox backup is an export of a user's entire Exchange mailbox to a PST file and includes individual mailbox items (eg. emails, calendar, etc). You may like read our Exchange Mailbox white paper for more details.

Also see our Exchange Product Tour page for more about BackupAssist's Exchange backup capabilities.

For more information about how the SQL Add-on works in BackupAssist see our SQL Product Tour page and SQL Add-on White Paper

BackupAssist is designed to back up to Tape*, external hard drive, REV? drive, QuikStor, CD/DVD, Blu-ray, FTP, NAS and file. BackupAssist includes tailored support for each backup hardware device, including specially designed rotation strategies and a variety of unique hardware options for each device type.

*Note: due to the lack of support for tape devices in Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Vista, you will require the BackupAssist Zip-To-Tape Add-on to backup to a standalone tape drive on these operating systems. Autoloaders or tape changers are not supported by BackupAssist at this time.

Yes, we do! BackupAssist v6 and the BackupAssist Zip-To-Tape Add-on form a very effective replacement for NTBackup on Windows Server 2008/R2, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and SBS 2008. Our tape drive solution utilizes our very own ZIP Engine that allows users to backup to a standalone tape drive and offers the added advantage of password protection using 256-bit AES encryption and real-time data compression to save data storage space and fit more backups on each tape.

The BackupAssist Zip Engine is based on the ZIP64 standard, meaning you can now backup to tape using the trusted and proven ZIP file format. As long as your tape drive ships with drivers (which all drives do), it will work with BackupAssist v6 and the BackupAssist Zip-To-Tape Add-on. You can even schedule Full, Differential, Incremental and Copy backups to your tape drive using the BackupAssist Zip Engine.

We developed this new and improved method of supporting tape drives because NTBackup (formerly the only method BackupAssist utilized for tape drive backups), has been discontinued and is not included in Windows Server 2008. It has been replaced with a block-level backup system that effectively images your drives and allows for bare-metal restores to dissimilar hardware. You can read more about this in our article How does Windows Server 2008 Backup work?

Generally you will only get a 1.4:1 compression ratio on your tape drive with hardware compression enabled in BackupAssist. Please note that the higher figure listed by tape drive manufacturers (eg. the 40Gb on a 20Gb/40Gb tape) is a best case scenario and is rarely achievable in practice. The compression ratio is highly dependent on the types of files you are backing up - JPEG images and MP3 files for example, will not benefit greatly from hardware compression as they are already greatly compressed. If you run out of space on your tape we suggest that you either reduce the amount of data you are backing up, create a second backup job with data selections that fit on a single tape, or exclude unnecessary file types from the backup (in BackupAssist, go to Edit >select your job > Files and folders > Exclusions).

For further information about tape drive compression refer to the following: FujiFilm Tape Drive Data Compression Q & A

BackupAssist is compatible with just about any standalone tape drive supported under Windows (2000, XP, 2003 and 2008 using the Zip engine). It is only autoloaders and tape libraries that we do not support.

If you find that both BackupAssist cannot communicate with your tape drive you should first ensure that no additional third party backup software products are installed on your system. We've found that certain other backup software products can overwrite the drivers for your tape drive device when first installed. Even when these programs are removed from the system, the drivers may still remain. BackupAssist utilizes the Windows drivers for communication with your tape drive, so you should ensure that the latest Windows drivers are installed for your tape drive device.

With the BackupAssist Zip-To-Tape Add-on you can choose to have your ZIP backups to tape encrypted with a password, making your data safe and secure. The Zip-To-Tape Add-on applies 256-bit AES encryption to a password protected tape backup. Once encrypted, a password is required to restore your data, so it is essential that you use a password that you can easily remember.

We offer both free email and phone support services for technical issues and sales related enquiries. Please see our support page for further information and for contact details.

To assist the support team with investigating your technical issue it is best to email us with diagnostic information first. Diagnostics can greatly assist with identifying the cause of technical issues. To send us this information, open the BackupAssist console, click the Contact Support link in the bottom left corner of the console, and then click Contact support and fill out the available form.

Additionally, while waiting for a response from the support team, you may like to consult some of our useful online resources that may address your technical query:

Support Centre

Knowledge Base

Documentation

Forums

Please let us know if you are able to resolve your problem before receiving a response from the support team. This helps to ensure prompt service for users with pending issues.