Parallels Desktop® for Mac has a delightful functionality called Snapshots, which helps you save your virtual machine’s state to ensure your work environment is backed up and protected. This functionality has been part of Parallels Desktop since version 3. It allows users to restore their VM environment to a previous state in case of issues. […]
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Guest blog article from Peter Hale, Content Manager (Consumer), Acronis In the (usually) friendly rivalry between Mac and PC users, there was always one fact that gave the edge to Mac – they were safer because they weren’t vulnerable to viruses or ransomware. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case: cybercriminals are casting a wider net and turning […]
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Guest blog article from Guennadi Moukine, Acronis! If you’re not already scheduling regular system backups for your Apple Mac, it’s time to do it. Now. It’s a small bit of insurance invested to protect against data loss and operational continuity disruption. If you are performing scheduled backups, make sure you are fully protecting your […]
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Parallels Support team guest author: Gunasekaran Udayakumar In today’s Internet age, the technology industry is constantly evolving. Do you remember how important local storage used to be? It’s now faded away, giving way to cloud services. Every day we are online, posting on social media channels, attending courses, and using a wide range of online […]
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Guest blog by Manoj Kumar Suresh, Parallels Support Team Easy ways to backup your virtual machine There are many perks of using a virtual machine over a regular PC. One of my favorites being how easy it is to backup and to restore my virtual machines. Below I’ll go over several ways to backup your […]
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Barracuda has recently released its new Essentials for Office 365 offering. In the past, I would get questions from customers about wanting to back up Office 365 to be able to control it themselves and not rely on Microsoft. I unfortunately never had much to tell them. You’re option was to go through Microsoft. Barracuda is now offering single email recovery without recovering the entire mailbox, associated attachments recovery, and conversation recovery. Barracuda has heard customers and delivered on those requests in a great way. If you’d like to hear me discuss Office 365 in more detail, check out a webinar I recently did.
Would you like to hear more from David around Office 365? Download his webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality“
By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies
Cloud-based backup and transfer systems could save 7.3 wasted lifetimes, according to recent 451 Research into the time consuming inefficiencies of modern phone sales, reports Telecoms.com.
American consumers lost 4.5 million hours waiting for their content to be transferred between their old and new smartphones in-store this holiday season, according to the study conducted on behalf of Synchronoss Technologies. That wasted time converts into 187,500 days, 514 years or 7.3 wasted human lifetimes. Cloud based backups, which run in the background, will give smart phone users their lives back, Synchronoss claims.
As 59% of Americans buy new smartphones in physical stores, and each customer now has an average of 10.8GB of picture files, videos and games to transfer over the in-store Wi-Fi connecting their old and new devices, waiting times are likely to get increasingly long, according to Synchronoss. The picture is largely the same in Europe, with 64% of sales in the UK being conducted in store and with an even bigger proportion, 67%, in France. The store channel was used by 62% of Germans, 51% of Italians and 65% of Spanish phone purchasers.
In the study, conducted independently by 451 Research over the holiday season, 33.3 million devices were sold in that period throughout the US and 19.6 million of them were bought in a shop, with 23% of these shoppers asking the sales reps to transfer their personal content for them. At a transfer rate of 10.8GB per hour, that equates to a 4.5 million hours of waiting time.
Device financing, leasing and accelerated upgrade programmes will only make the demand for upgrades – and the subsequent waiting time situation – worse, according to Synchronous, which argued that its new cloud based Backup & Transfer service is the answer.
“Carriers and retailers must deploy backup and transfer solutions so customer content is securely hosted in the cloud before they walk into stores and can be ported to a new device at any time,”
said Daniel Rizer, Synchronoss’s EVP of Product Management.
Microsoft’s Azure has promised more speed, lower cache demands and better data retention among a range of improvement to its cloud backup services for enterprise data.
Azure Backup now uses a technology called Update Sequence Number (USN) Journal in Windows to track the files that have changed between consecutive backups. USN keeps track of these changes to files and directories on the volume and this helps to identify changed files quickly.
The upshot of this tweak is a faster backup time. “We’ve seen up to a 50% reduction of backup times when using this optimization,” said Giridhar Mosay, Azure’s Program Manager for Cloud and Enterprise. Individual file server backup times will vary according to numbers and sizes of files and directory structure, Mosay warned.
A new algorithm that computes metadata has slashed the amount of cache space needed for each Azure Backup by 66%. The standard allocation of 15% cache space per volume size being backed up to Azure has proved prohibitive for volumes greater than 10TB. The new algorithm makes the cataloguing of the file space to be backed up a much more efficient process, which creates so much less metadata that it demands only 5% cache space, or less. Azure is now modifying its requirement for cache space to a third of the old level.
Meanwhile the resilience of the system has improved as Azure Backup has increased the number of recovery points for cloud backups. This allows for flexible retention policies to meet stringent compliance requirements such as HIPAA (the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) for large enterprises. The new maximum number of recovery points has increased from 366 to 9999.
Other tweaks include more timeouts across the various phases of backup process to ensure that long running jobs complete reliably. Cloud backups will also run a bit more efficiently as a result of a decoupling of the processes of cataloguing and uploading the backup data. Intermittent failures, in the service to handle incremental backups, have also been identified and resolved, according to Mosay. “We are continuing our journey to make Azure backup enterprise grade,” he said.
You probably saw the rumors come across Twitter, Facebook or on the newsstands in a checkout aisle. Perhaps, like me, you never thought it would actually happen, but the day is coming. Grab a tissue, Symantec and Veritas are breaking up.
Years ago, Symantec, an anti-virus company, merged with Veritas, a backup company known for such products as Backup and Netbackup forming a super power of sorts. This, however, is changing. Although Symantec and Veritas have been a staple in our lives for many years, starting next month they will be separated.
We’ve seen some tough breakups in the past. The Beatles, Ben and Jen, Britney and Justin, Ross and Rachel, Belichick and Revis, Peaches & Herb, (but I think they reunited), yet this Symantec and Veritas drama really stings. Like all good relationships, this one is coming to an end.
What’s the Deal?
Starting Friday October 2nd all backup related products like Backup Exec and Netbackup will change. This will be the last day to order these products under the current Symantec pricing and part number model.
On Monday October 5th any existing, open quotes for Backup Exec and Netbackup will need to be re-quoted using Veritas’s part numbers and pricing. The new Veritas SKUs won’t be visible until October 5th so, unless that changes, the new Veritas quotes can’t be created until October 5th. Since there is so much change taking place, there is a good possibility that pricing, at least on certain products, could change and increase.
Renewals: Big Change here. With Veritas, there will no longer be a 30 day grace period to get your renewals orders in. So, any Backup Exec and Netbackup renewals will have to be placed prior to its expiration date, otherwise Veritas will apply reinstatement fees. This will be strictly enforced.
There are no changes to Symantec i.e. AV products.
Dates to know:
Friday October 2nd – Last day to use Symantec related quotes for Backup Exec and Netbackup. This includes new and renewal quotes.
Monday October 5th – The new Vertias SKU’s will become available. Any open quotes will need to change over to the new part numbers. Pricing will likely change as well.
What Next?
If you’re working with GreenPages we will provide you a new Veritas quote, however, because we don’t currently know if there will be a price increase, we’d recommend placing your order prior to Friday October 2nd. Also, GreenPages has fantastic backup and retention solution architects and engineers. If you have any questions on Veritas or any other venders you could potentially switch over to, please let us know.
By Rob O’Shaugnessy, Director of Software Sales & Renewals
Pantheon has acquired NodeSquirrel, a cloud backup tech specialist
Pantheon, a large website managemet platform for Drupal and WordPress-based sites has acquired NodeSquirrel, a hosting provider specialising in open source cloud-based data backup technology.
NodeSquirrel provides hosting and data backup and recovery services to over 300,000 websites, and the acquisition will see Pantheon offer NodeSquirrel to its own customers for free. Some of the core NodeSquirrel team will also join Pantheon following the acquisition.
“We have always had a big vision for what could be possible with NodeSquirrel. With Pantheon’s support, those dreams are going to become reality. Our shared vision of great, easy-to-use tools for developers and agencies makes this an incredible opportunity. We are excited to join the Pantheon team,” said Drew Gorton co-founder of NodeSquirrel.
The move will give NodeSquirrel scale and Pantheon a new value-adding service to offer to existing customers. The company also said it plans larger investments into data backup and restore technology designed to handle larger file footprints and incremental backup.
Zack Rosen, Pantheon co-founder and chief executive officer said: “It’s 2015 and people are still storing backups of their website locally. If anything happens, whether that is a security attack or a natural disaster, those websites are not protected. Secure, reliable offsite backups are a fundamental best practice.”
“Acquiring NodeSquirrel gives Pantheon the ability to make secure offsite backups freely available to every Drupal website on the planet,” Rosen added.
Cloud-based data backup and recovery services are being deployed more and more in a bid to complement both online and on-premise systems. Click here to learn more about how to use the cloud for backup.