With the right mix of features, clear and predictable recovery procedures, SME friendly pricing and outstanding support, it’s no wonder our Windows Server backup software is trusted by businesses, government departments, education and non-profits around the world. The right recovery equals cyber-resilience.
the right backup
- The most expensive backup in the world is the wrong backup.
BackupAssist ER
- The right backup, trusted in 165 countries
What’s in it for you?
BackupAssist ER allows you to protect your Windows systems with state-of-the-art backups, giving you enduring resilience to cyber events, keeping you in business even if disaster occurs.
Cybercrime:
Hacking, Hijack
Natural Disaster, Fire,
Equipment Theft
Malicious Insider
Activity & Sabotage
Ransomware
There have never been more ways to lose data, as cybercrime has exploded in recent years. Now you can easily insure yourself and extenuate risks with BackupAssist ER.
Using BackupAssist ER delivers these
great benefits and capabilities:
Enduring Resilience
Cybercrime is an unfortunate part of 21st century life. Add to that, the traditional risks of natural disasters, theft, and malicious insiders.
Resilience is about preparing for, withstanding and recovering from attacks and disaster events.
Eliminating Ransoms
So many organizations back up their data but still have to pay ransoms when they’re hit. Why? The devil is always in the detail.
The right backup, like BackupAssist ER, with CryptoSafeGuard, mitigates against many of the risks that catch others out.
Expert Response
Disaster situations are extremely stressful, emotionally draining and testing for emergency responders.
With BackupAssist ER, you can respond like an expert, instead of reacting haphazardly, by following our well documented recovery playbooks.
Extreme Recovery
Full server recoveries are oftentimes required in adverse and challenging circumstances. You cannot rely on always having the same hardware or cloud as your recovery target.
BackupAssist ER can back up any source (physical, virtual, cloud) and recover to any target (physical, virtual, cloud) with the same Lifeline Recovery media.
Easy Restore
Users frequently make mistakes and require specific and targeted pieces of data to be restored from backup.
Full search capabilities across all backup history make restoring granular pieces of data easy.
Extended Retention
Many laws mandate extended data retention. Keeping historical backups is an ideal way to meet these requirements.
Retrieve your data from backups, even years or decades later, thanks to our well designed procedures and systems.
Register your interest in BackupAssist ER.
- Your email address and contact details are handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy and GDPR compliance statement.
- During your trial period, we will send you information on how to download and install BackupAssist WHF, best practice backups for cyber-resilience, important recovery procedures, and of course the all-important Recovery Bible.
How does BackupAssist ER work?
BackupAssist ER allows you to protect your Windows systems with state-of-the-art backups, giving you enduring resilience to cyber events, keeping you in business even if disaster occurs.
NextGen
Lifeline Recovery
BackupCare
CryptoSafeGuard
NextGen
Next Generation, Disk-to-Disk-to-Cloud backup
Modern cyber-resilience requires system backups that are stored both onsite and offsite. BackupAssist ER delivers this with a fully automated backup system.
1. The backup architecture
BackupAssist ER features a Disk-to-Disk-to-Cloud (D2D2C) architecture*.
- The first stage is a drive image, performed to a local disk.
- The second stage is replicating the drive image to the cloud.
This architecture enables both full system recovery and granular restores.
Recovering from your local backup gives you the fastest recovery time. Meanwhile, the cloud copy is a dependable fallback in case your local backup has been destroyed.
BYO storage model means you can control exactly where your data is stored, while fully owning your backup data, and saving on costs.
Data portability and redundancy are easy because both the local and cloud copies of the backup can be further replicated:
- Local backups – can be replicated by copying the backup directory
- Cloud backups – can be replicated into a different storage container by copying all blobs across.
- You can recreate a local backup from the cloud copy by using the Download Cloud Backup feature.
This architecture gives you numerous recovery options – so you can choose the best recovery depending on your particular situation.
* As an alternative to D2D2C, it is possible to simply perform straight Disk-to-Disk backups.
2. Local backups
Backup Engine: BackupAssist’s NextGen drive image engine.
Supported destinations:
- any locally mapped disk (USB, iSCSI),
- network share (including NAS)
Backup file format: VHDX file
Past versioning: achieved through reverse incremental (reverse delta)
VSS support: all VSS compatible applications are supported via VSS snapshotting when the backup runs.
Compression: to maintain compatibility with the VHDX file format, the local backup is not compressed.
Encryption: optionally encrypt using AES-256 encryption controlled by secret password.
Resilience to failure:
- if a backup is interrupted, the subsequent backup will auto recover
- because of the reverse incremental design, you will never suffer a broken chain of incremental backups or need to collapse incremental backups to save space.
Manually replicating the backup: simply copy the BackupAssistBackups directory to a new destination.
3. Cloud backups
Backup Engine: BackupAssist’s file-based cloud backup engine.
Supported destinations:
- Amazon S3 bucket
- Microsoft Azure Blob Storage container
- Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage
- S3 compatible cloud storage
Backup file format: proprietary deduplicated, compressed and encrypted data blob
Past versioning: every past version is independent of each other, due to the design. There are no differentials or incrementals. The retention policy for cloud backups (the number of past versions to retain) is independent of the retention policy of the local backup.
Deduplication and compression: achieves typical space savings of 50% to 75%.
Encryption: data is always encrypted using AES-256 encryption controlled by secret password.
Resilience to failure:
- if a backup is interrupted, the subsequent backup will auto recover
Manually replicating the backup to another cloud storage provider: simply copy the entire contents of a cloud storage container to a new destination.
Manually downloading the backup: you can recreate a local backup in VHDX format by downloading a cloud backup using the BackupAssist ER console.
For more details, see the product walk-through – install, set up and start a disk-to-disk-to-cloud backup in 4 minutes 51 seconds.
Lifeline Recovery
Bare Metal Recovery with Lifeline Recovery Media
When the worst happens and you need to do a full server rebuild from bare metal, reach for your Lifeline Recovery Media.
- Bootable Recovery Environment - boot a "blank" machine in order to reimage your computer from backup
- Extreme recovery situations are handled with ease – P2P, P2V, P2C, V2P, V2V, V2C, C2P, C2V, C2C
- One disc for all Window OS versions, making it super convenient for administrators
- Commence your recovery with just 5 mouse clicks – it’s that simple.
1. Creating your Lifeline
When to create it: normally you only need to do it once. We recommend creating your Lifeline after setting up your first backup job. However, it can be created at any time.
Supported media: USB Flash Drive, or ISO
Supported Operating Systems: you can create Lifeline using any Operating System (Windows Server 2012 or later), and use it to recover any supported operating system.
Size of media: approximately 512MB.
2. Using your Lifeline
On physical machines: insert your USB media into the computer, and boot off Lifeline.
On virtual (guest) machines: copy the ISO file to the host on which you are recovering. Then configure your hypervisor to attach the ISO as a CD/DVD drive.
Loading drivers: from within the Recovery Environment, you may load additional drivers.
Recovery process: you can select which disks to re-image. You can specify which volume to recover to which disk.
Recovering to different sized disks: you can recover any volume to a new disk as long as the new disk is of equal or bigger size. Volumes may be recovered to different disks of smaller size, as long as there is enough space to host each volume.
- Original machine: single 4TB disk, with 2 volumes, each 2TB.
- Recovery machine: two 3TB disks.
This scenario is allowable, because each of the 2TB volumes can fit onto the new 3TB disks.
Hardware independent recovery: Lifeline supports recovery to dissimilar hardware. One or more reboots may be required after the recovery is complete, as Windows installs new drivers.
3. Support tools
Command Prompt: you may start a command prompt within Lifeline and run useful tools such as diskpart.
Diagnostics: if you encounter a problem, Lifeline can create a diagnostics file that will help BackupAssist Support troubleshoot the problem.
Remote sessions: Lifeline media includes the ability to open a remote session so that BackupAssist Technical Support can assist.
For more details, see the product walk-throughs:
BackupCare
Granular Recovery for Files, Exchange and Apps
Oftentimes, your recoveries will be in response to user accidents. When all you need back are some files or emails, BackupAssist ER’s granular recovery comes to the rescue.
1. Recovering files and folders
Files and folders can be recovered from either a local or cloud backup.
Restore options:
- Restore to original location, or alternate location.
- Optionally restore NTFS security attributes and access controls.
- Optionally take ownership of files and folders after completion.
- Restoring from the cloud – apply throttling to control bandwidth usage.
2. Recovering VSS applications
VSS applications can be recovered from either a local or cloud backup.
BackupAssist ER creates application-consistent backups using VSS to ensure that the application data is complete and consistent with each backup.
Different applications offer different levels of granularity in the restore. For SQL and Exchange, you can choose specific databases to restore.
Restore options:
- Restore to original location, or alternate location.
- Optionally restore NTFS security attributes and access controls.
- Optionally take ownership of files and folders after completion.
- Restoring from the cloud – apply throttling to control bandwidth usage.
3. Recovering Exchange items
BackupAssist ER includes the Exchange Granular Restore, a dedicated console that makes it easy to locate and recover specific mailbox items.
Exchange Granular Restore can be run on local backups only. If you need to restore from your cloud backup, you can download the Exchange backup files first.
These items can be restored:
- Restore these items: Email messages, calendar, contacts, tasks, journals, notes
- Restore to original Exchange Server, an alternate Exchange Server (same or different mailbox), or PST file.
- Search for items within the Exchange Database.
CryptoSafeGuard
CryptoSafeGuard Protection against Ransomware
Ever wonder why so many businesses still have to pay ransoms, despite having backups? CryptoSafeGuard mitigates many of the risks associated with ransomware.
1. Shield your backup files from ransomware attack
Without CryptoSafeGuard:
Ransomware can attack your backup files directly in exactly the same way that it can attack data files on any of your infected systems.
With CryptoSafeGuard:
CryptoSafeGuard blocks unauthorized file access to the backup files, providing a shield between your backup files and ransomware.
2. Detect - Preserve - Alert
Without CryptoSafeGuard:
The other way ransomware can harm your backups is indirectly, by attacking files on your file system. When the next backup runs, those corrupted files will be backed up, displacing your original files.
With CryptoSafeGuard:
When suspicious activity is detected, CryptoSafeGuard springs into action, preserving the last known-good backup, and sending an SMS alert to the registered administrator.
How is BackupAssist ER different?
Your data is your data. At all times, you have 100% control over where your data lives. Whatever your nation’s data sovereignty laws are, you can comply with BackupAssist ER.
Not only are you protecting your business against downtime and ransoms, but you have to comply with privacy legislation such as GDPR, HIPAA, PIPEDA, the Notifiable Breaches Act, … and the list goes on. Every additional copy of data is a potential data breach risk. ·
Whenever your data is stored on someone else’s server (i.e. in the cloud), BackupAssist ER utilizes AES-256 encryption to secure that data against prying eyes – 100% of the time. The security simply cannot be turned off.
Oftentimes you need to get your data back many years after it was created – so you naturally go to your historical backups. But historical backups are rarely useful if your data is locked inside a proprietary data format of a backup vendor.
Your local backup copies are stored in the VHDX file format, which is an open specification.
This means you can use BackupAssist to restore your data. But you can also use any 3rd party program that can open VHDX files, or even mount the VHDX using Microsoft’s Operating System tools to get your data back.
With our industry-first, 5-year pricing guarantee, you are assured of the long-term affordability of your backup solution. When you join our subscription programs, the price you see today will be your guaranteed price ongoing for the next 5 years, regardless of the current market price.
BackupAssist ER is our crowning achievement: the culmination of two decades of developing backup software and all we’ve learnt
You get it out of the box; best practice procedures are implemented automatically in the software, through a clear and simple User Experience
- We will never take your trust for granted.
- Our people are empowered to find solutions.
- We actually care about our Clients and want to know when we can improve.
Your path to cyber-resilience
It’s easy to get on the path to cyber-resilience. Here are some recommended next steps for you to take:
Take the 30-day Trial of BackupAssist ER for free!
It’s completely risk free.
Within 30 days not only will you have successful backups, but you should also have performed several test recoveries.
Within 30 days not only will you have successful backups, but you should also have performed several test recoveries.
Book a 15-minute consultation to discuss your resilience goals.
We understand that cyber-resilience doesn’t just grow on trees. Someone has to make it happen – you.
We’re here to help.
We’re here to help.
Ask us questions! Get as technical as you want.
Ping us here on instant chat (US Eastern hours), or reach out via email.
There aren’t many questions we can’t answer!
There aren’t many questions we can’t answer!
