Kiwi CatTools, part of the SolarWinds family, allows Windows admins to manage and back up configurations of network devices.

If you’ve ever had a firewall that’s suddenly on the fritz, you can appreciate the necessity of a regular firewall configuration backup schedule. SolarWinds offers a great product, Kiwi CatTools, targeted for Windows administrators who want to automate some of the more mundane tasks of everyday network and systems administration, including backing up firewall configurations.

Kiwi CatTools – Main console

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Altaro is raffling off a license of the Unlimited Edition of their new version 3 of Hyper-V-Backup. This review gives an overview of the easy-to use Hyper-V virtual machine backup software.

The raffled license is worth 345 euro and allows you to back up an unlimited number of virtual machines on a Hyper-V host. The deadline of this contest is April 4, 2012. If you want to take part in this contest, please send an e-mail with the subject “Altaro Hyper-V Backup” to .

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The free edition of Altaro Hyper-V Backup is a perfect backup software for small Hyper-V deployments. The free Hyper-V backup tool supports live backups, ReverseDelta ™, and Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

Submitted by David Vella – Blog: Altaro Blog for Hyper-V & Windows Administration

Altaro Hyper-V Backup

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In this fourth and last part of this DPM 2012 review series we’ll look at a new authentication mechanism for servers in untrusted domains or workgroups and we look at some improvements that should be added to DPM and conclude the series with some overall comments.

DPM 2010 provides the ability to protect servers in workgroup or non-trusted domains, using local accounts and NTLM based authentication. This capability proved less than popular in large enterprises because of the inherent weakness in NTLM, auditing difficulties and local account management. DPM 2012 adds another authentication method (the previous capabilities are still available); certificate based authentication. The following workloads are supported; SQL Server, File Server, Hyper-V and these can be clustered as well as standalone (note the missing pieces here, no Exchange, SharePoint, System State / Bare Metal Recovery or client computers). A secondary DPM server for DR can also use this authentication method.

All protection in DPM is done around the concept of Protection Groups.

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In this third part of the review of Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2012 we’ll cover a host of different improvements such as Item Level Recovery (ILR) from host level backups even when DPM is installed as a VM, ILR improvements for SharePoint recoveries and tape co-location enhancements.

In a virtualized environment the issue is whether to backup from inside the guest or from the host. The latter provides “bare metal restore” of an entire VM where something’s gone catastrophically wrong with a VM (or the host) but in general it doesn’t provide granular restore of files / folders. DPM 2010 added Item Level Restore (ILR), allowing you to restore individual files or folders within a VM even though it had only been backed up from the host. But this capability was only available when DPM 2010 ran on physical hardware, if the DPM server itself was in a VM this capability was not available. DPM 2012 fixes this glitch and can now do ILR even when the DPM server is a VM.

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In this second part of this four part series reviewing DPM 2012 we’ll look at the new Role Based Access feature and dive into the scoped DPM console.

The scoped DPM console

The Central Console also enables another nifty troubleshooting feature – the scoped DPM console. When an alert is raised in SCOM you can click the Troubleshoot button which will take you to a DPM console which only shows the data sources, backup jobs and agents that are affected by this particular issue. Even better, once you have resolved the underlying cause you can run a test backup with a single click before resuming the entire backup job. It also provides context; the ticket number, alert and DPM server is listed in an area at the top of the scoped console.

Centralizing management inside of SCOM doesn’t just mean an aggregated view of all backups across many DPM servers; it also lets you work on more important issues first, for instance by showing issues that affect multiple data sources. Segregating errors into infrastructure and backup failures enables Tier 1 or 2 support to focus on backup failure alerts, whereas Backup Admins work on infrastructure problems and Tape Admins focus on tape errors.

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In this first part of this four part series on Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2012 I cover the installation as well as the new Centralized Console.

Introduction

Protecting your data and systems running Microsoft workloads is paramount and the best way to do that is with Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM). This is an enterprise class product that’s gone from strength to strength over the last few versions. In this review we’ll look at DPM 2012 Release Candidate.

DPM 2012

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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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