CryptoLocker has been in the news a lot recently. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, it is a Trojan Ransomware that’s specifically targeted to computers running the Windows OS (operating system). There are more variants or clones of this specific Trojan around today, and while not related to the original CryptoLocker, they all basically do the same thing. The name, CryptoLocker, is still used for the different variants, even though they are technically all called Ransomware.

Data centers of today are dealing with three serious challenges: 24/7 operations, no patience for downtime or data loss and a growing amount of data. Investments in modern storage systems can help the Always-On Business run and meet these needs, but there is a challenge on where and how we will store backup data for the data center of today.

The natural choice to meet this challenge is to leverage deduplicating storage systems, and HP StoreOnce Catalyst is coming in Veeam Backup & Replication v9 (Part of Veeam Availability Suite). HP StoreOnce Catalyst allows companies to take control of data by providing enhanced backup performance and control for data movement across the enterprise.

If you’re performing a backup over a network, this option is definitely something you need to pay attention to. Feel free to call it a hidden gem, but this tiny checkbox could save you a fortune. Once enabled, it allows Veeam Endpoint Backup Free to automatically detect and suspend a backup whenever metered connection is used whether it is a scheduled or ad-hoc backup.

Why would you want to do that and miss backup schedules? The answer is simple, because of costs. Imagine pushing a large backup to the personal cloud or publicly available backup repository through a limited connection, where you have to pay for every Megabyte.

Over the last few months, I have become intimately familiar with the UCS C3160 server. (See Figure 1.) This high-density rack server has 62 drive bays, holds 60 large, form factor (3.5”) hard disk drives and has room for two SSDs. Dual Intel Xeon processors, up to 512 GB of RAM and all of that storage in a 4RU form factor — WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE? The C3160 also has a VIC (virtual interface card) with four 10 GbE ports and a nice RAID controller, with up to 4 GB of battery-backed, write cache. This thing is built to be a performer!

Today, more and more devices have BitLocker encryption enabled by default. For instance, every Microsoft Surface tablet has an operating system volume protected by BitLocker out of the box. For this very reason, we decided that that Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE should fully support BitLocker encrypted volumes.

This blogpost is the third in a three-part series on AD (Active Directory) administration best practices. Have you ever had the horrible realization that you just deleted the wrong computer account from the domain? Or have you ever reset a service-account password for a mission-critical application and the password reset broke an entire application suite and had to rollback? And, worse, you didn't save the old password? Bad moments like these happen to IT pros just like you. The questions are how to recover and do it quickly. Thankfully, you CAN restore service quickly. All you need are the right tools.

Imagine you've setup your Veeam Endpoint Backups to use an external USB drive as a repository. After a while you set up a brand new NAS for home needs and decide to use it as a backup target. Reasonable question: can I migrate all existing backup files from one location to another without losing any supported functionality? The answer is yes you can! The procedure is pretty simple - let’s take a closer look.

My backups are stored on a removable hard drive in the default location (%volume% VeeamBackup/Backup Job %ComputerName%) because I’ve used the backup job auto configuration from the Endpoint’s setup.

We announced the Veeam Management Pack (MP) v8 for System Center beta just a couple of months ago and told you about lots of improvements we made. Now, after adding some additional features and performing some intensive QC-department testing because of the always-appreciated feedback of our community, partners and end-users, we are, at last, ready to release the general availability version of MP!

In Part 1, Protecting the Active Directory Domain Services – Best Practices for AD administration, I focused on protection steps to protect your domain service locally. Unfortunately, most environments have multiple locations, otherwise known as ROBOs (Remote Office Branch Offices). Examples include remote, colocation and cloud data centers, retail stores, satellite offices, distribution centers, manufacturing plants and more. These locations are often geographically separated by many hundreds or thousands of miles, require only simple file, print and share services and are often without an IT staff. Server virtualization has drastically improved the way these services are deployed.

In the Backup Modes in depth post we explained you the different modes that exist in Veeam Backup & Replication. In this post, we are going to dig a bit deeper on the File Level Backup method and explain the exclusions also.

This will be a rather short post, but it is certainly handy to know what your possibilities are.