EASEUS Todo Backup Free Edition is a free backup program that supports backups of disks/partitions and files/folders, clone disks/partitions, universal restores and disk upgrades under Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7.

Submitted by Cindy Su

EASEUS Todo Backup Free is free for home and business users and offers many features that usually only commercial backup solutions have. The easy-to-use backup program doesn’t come with spyware or the need to install a browser toolbar.

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This article explains how to troubleshoot orphaned VMware Consolidate Helper-0 snapshots caused by failed VMware backups.

If you are using any of the snapshot-based backup solutions for your virtualized machines—Veeam Backup & Replication and vRanger being the two most popular—then from time to time you are probably going to see a failed backup. This is a common occurrence even with traditional backup solutions, but in this situation it can have a drastic effect on your production environment.

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A recent email archiving survey commissioned by GFI Software found that 62.4% of US SMEs have not implemented an email archiving solution within their organization.

When responses were correlated with the total number of employees, it turned out that the smaller the organization, the less likely it was to have implemented an email archiving solution, while larger companies were more likely to have done so.

While the results indicated almost 2 in three of respondents had not implemented an email archiving solution, the survey also revealed that only 33.2% of respondents were familiar with the regulatory and compliance standards in the US that imply the need for email archiving. As before, the larger the business, the more likely the respondent was to have knowledge of email archiving and compliance.

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To back up and restore a DHCP server properly, you have to know a few things about how Windows stores the DHCP data.

DHCP is one of those essential services that can knock out a network if problems come up. That is why it is important to back up the DHCP server regularly and—even more important—to know how to restore a DHCP server.

Every Windows system backup contains a backup of the DHCP server with the database DHCP leases and the DHCP settings. However, many backup solutions only allow you to restore the complete system state but not specific system data such as those of the DHCP server. If you only have problems with the DHCP server, restoring a complete system state is usually not what you would want because it might affect other services.

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Scheduling restores (disaster recovery training) and backing up backups (offsite backups) are essential for every modern backup strategy.

In my last post, I explained why I am strictly against scheduling backups. However, when it comes to restores I am a big fan of schedules. Another golden rule that belongs in every backup strategy is the backup of backups rule.

Schedule restores

Now before you check whether your backup software has a feature for scheduling restores, read on to see what I mean by “scheduling restores.” Most backup experts recommend verifying regularly that backups are working properly. However, in my view, this is not enough. Just like manual backups are not a professional way to secure data, checking every now and then if the backed up data is really on the disks or tapes is certainly insufficient.

First of all, it is not very likely that you will really do it regularly. Be honest. When did you check your backups the last time? Second, it is not enough to check if the data was backed up. You really have to test the restored data in an environment that you prepared for this purpose.

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In this article I argue that backup methods relying on schedules and backup job configurations are no longer up to date.

Data backups are one of the most important tasks for any IT department. In my view, they are even more important than security. It can get nasty if a virus knocks down your network for a few hours. However, if you lose essential data, it could knock down your whole company forever. If you need some more motivation to read on, check out these statistics according to which 60% of companies that have lost their data will shut down within 6 months.

The problem is that admins are often busy with keeping the network running or meeting project deadlines. Backup management is often the first task that is neglected when admins are under time pressure because daily operations are usually not affected by a faulty backup strategy. But this is only true until a backup is really needed.

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There was a big hype when Apple introduced their Time Machine in v10.5 of OS X. Basically, Time Machine makes it possible to travel back in time – not with your body, that is, but with your computer’s data. Time Machine creates a system restore point at specified times. With Time Machine’s GUI, you can go back in time and restore your system to the exact state it was in when Time Machine performed a backup.

Comodo recognized the shortcomings of an easy-to-use system restore utility in the Windows world and released a system restore tool with a nice user interface. Named after the Apple pendant Time Machine, Comodo’s Time Machine tool is simple to use. The only configuration task you have to do during installation is specify the hard drives for which you want to enable Time Machine.

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Blackbird recovery offers two types of Active Directory backups: audits and scheduled backups. The audit-based backups are for continuous data protection (CDP), and scheduled backups are backup tasks that run at configurable times. That way, Blackbird recovery offers the advantages of both backup technologies—CDP and scheduled backups.

Continuous data protection for Active Directory

If you require a more recent backup, you want to determine the point in time of the backup more precisely. In most cases, you will just need the last available state; with real-time CDP, this is the state right before the corresponding directory objects have been modified.

To enable CDP you will need to deploy a data handler to every domain controller to capture all of the changes from a continuous change log to rollback unwanted changes.

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In my last post, I gave you an overview of the essential benefits of Blackbird recovery. Today, I will describe the Active Directory backup tool’s architecture and its main functions.

Data handler

The diagram above gives you an overview of Blackbird recovery’s architecture. As you can see, you have to install an agent, the Blackbird Data Handler, on all your domain controllers to enable the collection of a continuous change log. This agent is not only for Blackbird continuous recovery but for all the other modules of the Blackbird Management Suite. The agent collects the data and directly stores it into a Microsoft SQL Server (or SQL Server Express) database.

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The Blackbird Group is raffling two license packages of Blackbird recovery for AD, a sophisticated Activate Directory backup tool. The value of each license is $1,800 USD and allows you to back up an Active Directory with 500 users. You will find more information about how to take part in this contest at the end of the article.

Blackbird recovery is a module of the Blackbird Management Suite, which consists of Blackbird auditor for AD (real-time auditing for Active Directory), Blackbird auditor for Windows File System (real-time file system auditing), Blackbird privilege explorer for Windows File System (access rights reporting), Blackbird protector (protection against AD modifications), and Blackbird privilege manager (workflow based management of AD privileges).

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The release of SharePoint 2010 caused a lot of hype. Nonetheless, its predecessor Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is still used in many companies. For those who haven’t updated yet, I want to introduce a very valuable tool: SharePoint Utility with a Smart, Helpful Interface (SUSHI).

SharePoint is a big success for various reasons; one of them is certainly the ease of administration. Once you have internalized the structure of SharePoint, it is very straightforward to use. Almost too straightforward: because it is so easy to create new websites and lists, web applications often grow too fast and unstructured. Keeping the content ‘findable’ often requires the taming of the rank growth. It is a difficult task, but doable.

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In my last post, I described how convenient it is for admins to configure backup jobs with GFI Backup. Today, I will show you how end users can manage their own backup jobs, thereby making the life of admins even easier.

Agent configuration

I already mentioned in the first post of this series that the agent basically is GFI Backup Home. That is, end users have a full-fledged backup tool on their desktops. Please read my review of GFI Backup’s free edition for a detailed description of how users can manage backups with this free tool. In this article, I will describe only the additional features that come with the business edition.

First of all, you should know that admins can disallow access to the agent’s user interface. Actually, this is the default setting. With this configuration users will only be informed whenever a backup job starts or if errors have occurred.

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In the last article in this series, I gave a short introduction into GFI Backup. Today, I will talk about the features that make GFI Backup a perfect desktop and laptop data backup solution for businesses.

Last time I mentioned that new backup clients are added automatically to the GFI Backup Administrator Console. In some environments the backup admin might prefer to authorize new backup clients. For this you can disable auto-approve in GFI Backup’s settings.

Automatic data backup job configuration

However, automatically adding new backup clients has its advantages in environments with many desktops. GFI Backup is a specialized solution for this situation because it can also configure the backup jobs automatically for new clients.

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GFI is raffling an Asus netbook worth 328 USD and a license of the brand new GFI Backup Business Edition, —a server and desktop backup solution for small- and mid-sized organizations— for 500 workstations and 50 servers worth 7,100 EUR.

The netbook runs Windows 7 and its battery lasts a whopping 11 hours (1 more than with the iPad). It is the ideal gadget to restore user backups with GFI Backup directly from the beach or wherever you plan to spend your summer holidays. You’ll find more information about the contest at the end of the article.

GFI Backup Business Edition allows you to back up servers and desktops with one solution. However, the main strength of this backup tool is that end users can independently restore backups and even create their own backup jobs. Administrators can centrally monitor everything and only have to intervene if problems arise. So chances are that you only need your netbook to watch some Flash videos (which you can’t do with the iPad) when you get bored by all this sand and water.

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In my previous post, I described Oops!Backup’s CDP features and its advantages over conventional backup tools. Today, I will give you an overview of the tool’s so-called ReverseDelta technology and how you can use the tool for notebook backups.

Oops!Backup’s ReverseDelta stores file changes in so-called delta files. These delta files contain changes at the byte level. There is some overhead if only a few bytes are changed, but this can save a lot disk space on your backup drive if you have to secure large files as they are common with database systems. For instance, a conventional backup system will store a full 10GB database if only one record has been changed, but Oops’Backup would only require a few MBs of additional space. The tool allows you to configure the file size on which ReverseDelta is invoked, and you can also specify the number of versions after which a full copy of a file is preserved.

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