When you work with anyone over a period of time, you can build a good relationship with them.
This is true even when dealing with people from a technical support team. But have you ever sat down and wondered, Who are these people? Or, Where did this company come from?
Today I’d like to give you a peek into the wonderful world that is BackupAssist – and even enlighten you with a little company history.
BackupAssist started as a hobby project to help one particular system administrator set up a reliable business grade backup system with NTBackup on Windows NT and 2000.
It was designed to address the shortcomings of NTBackup (inadequate scheduling, media rotation, and monitoring). It would also
overcome a number of bugs within Removable Storage Manager on Windows 2000, where tapes were not being detected in the tape drive causing scheduled backups not to run.
As with many other software developers, this lone system administrator wanted to share the software with others who were having the same issues.
So in 2002 the software was released to the public and a basic website was built for software support.
Immediate feedback for BackupAssist was incredible! By mid-2003, enough users had purchased the software, indicating that continued development was warranted and desired.
Over the next 3 years, new and extra features were added, but always with the view to making backups easy for novice system administrators and with enough advanced
features for the veteran system administrator.
When 2006 came, add-ons for Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange Server mailboxes had been created and were welcomed by our customers.
The Exchange Server add-on was built to take advantage of Microsoft’s Exmerge tool, which exported mailboxes to PST files.
The main aim of the BackupAssist developers is to provide a software which is “Engine Independent” – platform that can integrate with any back-end engine with ease.
In addition, being able to leverage existing backup engines and open standards mean that Research and Development time is reduced, thereby giving BackupAssist a price advantage.
Here at BackupAssist, we are always exploring new paths to find new ways to improve our product for our customers. In fact, as this is being written (May 2008), a whole suite of engines are being developed, including solutions for file based backups, and Internet based file synchronisation and other application backup. Please keep reading our blogs (both support and developer) and as I get more information, I’ll keep you posted on our progress!
cheers,
Aarthi
BackupAssist Support Team
