We have been working hard for the past months and are happy to announce that the new MSP360 Managed Backup 5.2 is finally here! This massive milestone release introduces the new backup format, which allows for a number of amazing features.
New Backup Format: Faster, More Efficient, Secure, and Reliable
First things first. The main part of the release is the new backup format, which is based on the concept of archiving. Unlike the common backup process where the backup solution uploads files directly to the cloud piece by piece, the new format involves analyzing files and putting them in special archives, meaning that every data set is stored separately from all other backups.
The new backup format speeds up the backup process, improves the integrity of the data at rest, and significantly reduces the time to restore. And not only that, it also makes several long-awaited features finally possible. Let’s talk more about those.
Optimize Your Resources With GFS
Grandfather-father-son (GFS) is a popular archival backup retention strategy that uses backup rotation to keep several full backup copies. These full backups have different retention routines: weekly (son), monthly (father), and yearly (grandfather).
With the GFS setup, MSP360 Managed Backup automatically picks the weekly, monthly, and yearly backups and stores them accordingly. It allows you to create a flexible archival strategy and optimize the number of full backups to significantly reduce storage costs.
Get Peace of Mind With Restore Verification
When you run a system image backup, the most important thing you want to be sure of is that you can restore it later. After all, what would be the point of backing up if it couldn’t be recovered later? Restore Verification is the feature that ensures the recoverability of your system image backups.
Here is how it works. Right after the backup is complete, MSP360 Managed Backup recovers the data just enough for a quick launch. Then it builds a Hyper-V virtual machine, mounts it, and boots up the system. The result of the check is sent to you by email. No need to test your restores manually anymore; now, it’s all done for you automatically.
Increase Security With Built-In Consistency Checks
To further verify the availability and consistency of the backed-up data, we have implemented mandatory and full consistency checks.
The mandatory check is enabled by default. It verifies that all the files required for a restore exist in the storage and that there are no data losses. It includes only the current backup generation (the latest full backup and all subsequent incrementals).
The full consistency check takes longer, but includes all backups of the selected backup plan. With both checks, if there is anything wrong with the data in the current generation, MSP360 Managed Backup will force a full backup that can be restored if necessary.
Streamline Your Backups With Client-Side Deduplication
Datasets that are uploaded during backup can be huge, and transferring identical files located in different folders can be redundant and might take a long time. To reduce the time, bandwidth, and storage consumption, we have implemented client-side deduplication in the new backup format.
Synthetic Full Backup for Files, Images, and VMware
Synthetic full has always been available for image-based backups with MSP360. Now you can use it for files and VMware as well. The reason behind synthetic full backup is quite simple: you get much faster backups, since only the changed data is uploaded to the cloud to build the full backup based on the data uploaded previously.
Synthetic full backup is enabled by default and works for the following cloud storage services:
- Amazon S3
- Microsoft Azure
- Backblaze B2
- Wasabi
For the full list of changes, check this guide: MSP360 Managed Backup 5.2: The Power of the New Backup Format
Conclusion
With the new format, backups and restores are processed much faster, storage costs and bandwidth are reduced, and data gets checked several times to ensure it’s not corrupted and is readily available for recovery.
Please note: the new backup format functionality for VMware is accessible through the backup agent only.
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