In addition to the major features in added in BackupAssist v6.4.0 such as added support for iSCSI backups and the all new RecoverAssist. There are also some important bug fixes which address problems our Technical Support Engineers have recently discovered. A quick overview of these fixes is listed below:
License deactivation (FB 11398)
Several users have been having difficulties deactivating their BackupAssist licenses and they have had to request assistance from Technical Support. The problem has been intermittent and we have been unable to reproduce the problem. In order to address the problem we’ve taken two approaches. Firstly, we’ve improved the error handling so that an error during deactivation should no longer cause the program to shut-down with an exception. Secondly, we’ve improved the messages which are written to the log files during deactivation, so that if the problem should occur again in the future we will be better able to diagnose and fix the problem.
Service shutting down after a few seconds (FB 11676, FB 10324)
There has been several cases recently where the service will only run for a few seconds and then shutdown. The problem appears to be caused by one or more jobs becoming corrupt which stops the service. We’ve put in some defensive code which will delete any invalids jobs during the service startup. In the event that an invalid job is automatically deleted a message will be made in the log file. We have also introduced an auto-recovery feature for the service so that it will attempt to restart itself in the event that it shuts down due to an error.
Fix potential error in Hyper-V / CSV backups (FB 11912)
When Hyper-V guests are running in a CSV environment, it is possible that they may perform a migration whilst a backup is running. In order to monitor this, BackupAssist makes a list of all guests which were on the node being backed up both prior to the backup commencing and again after completion. If the list is not the same after completion, the user will be alerted in the backup report that the backup may be incomplete. In some situations this mechanism fails due to a VSS error which was previously not being handled by BackupAssist. A fix has been introduced which handles the VSS error and now includes a message in the job’s report (BA4709) alerting the user that BackupAssist was not able to check whether any guests were missed.
BackupAssist v6.4.0 can be downloaded online.
