We sat down for a chat with Alex Robinson from our Sales Team. Alex has been with the company since October 2023. This piece has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The biggest difference that we're making for people is that we substantially streamline the data protection process for organizations, making it easier for people to set up and run backups.
A lot of people I talk to on calls say that their current backup systems have multiple disparate components or they are using several different backup systems to meet all their needs.
With Comet, you have a management console that has the flexibility to do whatever you want from within it. I’ve gotten feedback from people saying that with Comet they can consolidate all their backups into a single platform, and that it is simple to use.
What can an IT professional expect when they book a call with you?
I walk prospective customers through a high level overview of the product. I like to focus on understanding their backup requirements and how Comet can meet those requirements. Then I go over how our pricing works.
Often people are coming from other vendors who have more complicated licensing models. I find people are frequently pleasantly surprised that a conversation about Comet’s pricing plans only takes five minutes.
If they don’t have a free trial set up yet, I’ll help them get that going. Or if they’re ready to begin testing or deployment, I can book them in with our onboarding or technical team.
The goal is always for an MSP or an IT team to be up and running backups as quickly as possible to see how easy the product is to work with.
Basically, I'm solving a problem for someone or meeting a need that someone has for their business. I really enjoy helping people work through that.
Because my background is in account management and customer success (I actually managed a camera store for many years), cultivating a long term relationship is very important to me. So that’s always how I approach talking to potential partners.
What happens if Comet Backup isn’t the right solution for the problem they’re trying to solve?
I’m always up front and honest with customers and will tell them, “I don’t think Comet is the right fit for you.” I'm not trying to push people into buying something they don't need. I would rather they find the right solution for what they’re trying to achieve.
I wanted to be sure I was working for a company that’s actually constantly improving the product for customers and innovating and truly adding value when we release updates to the software. Comet is actively building the product and pushing it forward, which is really important to me.
#1 Run your backups regularly. And verify that your backups are configured correctly and are working as intended. Everyone talks about having backups, but the key is – are you checking the reporting around your backups on a regular basis? Have you configured the backup reports and are you actually following up on them?
#2 Are you doing test restores on things occasionally, and verifying the data is there? Don’t just set it and forget it. Set it and actively monitor your backups.
#3 Familiarize yourself with the recovery process. Because when you need to do a recovery, you almost always need to do it in a hurry. Make sure you know how to do it, how long it's going to take, and what's involved in the recovery process.
What's your favorite thing about working at Comet?
I love that the Comet team actually listens to the feedback we get from customers and prospects. So many companies claim to do that, but in reality they don’t. Comet is very open to listening and then the dev team prioritizes improving that functionality and building new features people would like to see in the software.
I appreciate the open channels of communication throughout the company. There aren’t any layers of bureaucracy, so to speak. You can talk to anyone about anything. And they will really take that customer feedback to heart.
How would you describe the team culture at Comet?
My favorite thing about working here is definitely how collaborative the team is, and that you can ask anyone for help. Especially when you're coming into a technical product like Comet, although I’ve previously worked in software and tech for a long time, there’s always a learning curve involved with learning about products in a new industry. So it’s been really helpful that everyone, including the dev teams and support team, are willing to help out with the technical learning curve.
Were there certain things that attracted you to work at Comet?
I was actively looking for a role that wasn't a nine-to-five job, something with more flexibility. When I saw the hours were early, that had huge appeal. I like to start early and finish early so I can do school pickup and spend time with my family.
What are some of your other interests or hobbies outside of work?
Most of my time is taken up with my family and kids, and the farm animals. I've got sheep, a miniature horse, ducks, chickens, turkeys, geese, and a dog. So that takes up most of my time outside of work.
National Clean Out Your Computer Day was started in 2000 as an initiative of the Institute for Business Technology and falls on the second Monday in February.
The event promotes taking time out of your day to do some basic housekeeping on your computer, such as backing up your computer, organizing your files and folders, updating software, and removing unused files.
Consider it an early start to spring cleaning. Just like any other cleaning or tidying up task, don’t get overwhelmed by trying to do it all at once, break it down into manageable chunks and just start with something easy, like deleting your folder of screenshots.
Before you delete any files, it’s a good idea to make sure you have a backup of your data, just in case!
And don’t forget about wiping the outside of your device, cleaning the screen and keyboard (say goodbye to fingerprints and keyboard crumbs).
Clean Out Your Computer Day for IT Providers & MSPs
IT Providers and MSPs can use Clean Out Your Computer Day to remind end users to create positive digital habits and walk them through how to perform a digital declutter. Below are some tips to show your clients and end users how to observe Clean Out Your Computer Day.
National #CleanOutYourComputerDay is another reminder to help us create good digital and cyber hygiene habits. Cleaning up and tidying our personal and work computers can help us:
Keep organized – making everything easier to find which will ultimately save time over the coming year
Make our computers run faster – by deleting unnecessary files and uninstalling unused applications
Give us peace of mind – by making sure our important files are properly saved and backed up, either locally or to the cloud, or both.
Below is a checklist and some additional references and resources about Clean Out Your Computer Day.
We sat down for a chat with Rhane Mercado, one of our Software Developers who has graduated from our Support/Junior Developer pathway, and has been with the company since January 2023. This piece has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
When I went to my first ever computer science class at university, I fell in love. It was math, and logic, and all this stuff that I understood and craved to learn. I really enjoy the problem solving aspect of it.
After that, I knew I wanted it to be my main focus, so I switched my major from environmental science to computer science and pretty much fell in love from there.
Before I graduated from University of Waikato, I was applying for jobs and I saw the Support/Junior Dev role at Comet. I checked out the company’s website and thought backup software could be interesting. In university you don’t really get introduced to backup software so it was something new.
Then when I had my interview with Josh (Comet’s General Manager), it was really eye opening, because a lot of companies say ‘we’re like family, we’re really cool, we get along’ etc. But five minutes into the interview, I was like ‘I like this dude, I like his vibe, the company does sound cool, and I would like to work for somebody like him.’
Everyone is so willing to tell you about the technology. Everyone is so passionate about everything. Everyone loves to give good feedback, and also everyone can take feedback.
The best thing is that you don't feel bad about asking questions. It's really been great, especially as a junior dev, to feel comfortable asking for help if you don’t know something. Even if you make a mistake, it’s okay, you learn from it and you don’t feel bad about it.
How would you describe the team culture at Comet?
It's great! The culture at Comet has been wonderful since I've started, everyone from the non-technical team and the dev teams have been really friendly. It’s a safe place where you feel comfortable asking questions and asking for help. And no matter how closely you work with someone or not, everyone across the company is always up for a friendly chat.
What do you enjoy about CometCon, our bi annual internal conference?
You get time to look at what everyone else is working on, and you get to understand the product a lot more. Especially as a junior dev, compared to some of the other developers who have been in the industry for ten years, it’s a great opportunity to learn. CometCon is awesome because there’s more interaction between the two dev teams, and it’s cool to see what the other team is working on.
I really enjoy the technical talks from Mason, our CTO, because just looking at the code, it’s hard to understand, but when Mason explains his point of view, everything makes a lot more sense.
What does a typical day and week look like for you as a developer?
A typical day is pretty much say hello to everyone, and then you start working on the git ticket that you’ve picked up. At 10am, we have our team stand up meeting, each dev talks about what you worked on the previous day, and what you’re tackling today, then you start working on that ticket.
Sometimes through the support team a problem will pop up, and the dev team leader might ask you to look into the issue. So you might have to put your current dev project aside to work on a bug fix that’s more pressing.
On Thursdays we have team reviews, and Mason (Comet's CTO) and Callum (Comet's Product Engineering Manager) both jump on the call, and we show off what we've been working on for the past few days.
What’s the working schedule and flexibility like at Comet?
When I was working at the head office, I would start early in the morning, around 7 or 7:30am and then I'd finish work around 3:45pm-4pm, and I'd have the afternoon to myself.
When I moved back to Tauranga and started working remotely, I had other things on in the morning, so I shifted my start time a bit later, so it’s nice that we have that flexibility. There are team members who choose to start early and there are team members who choose to start later, so it feels like there’s always someone around you can talk to on Slack.
You're the third person to complete the support/junior dev to developer pathway. What was it like working for support before becoming a full-time developer?
Before coming into the support team, I had never worked in support before, so the first month I was just learning and asking lots of questions. The team was so helpful and patient while I got my bearings.
The beautiful thing about the support/junior developer pathway was that I got to see and experience Comet from a customer point of view. I got to see how everything fits together first before looking at the code.
Understanding all the different parts was really informative. So after a year of doing the support role and then becoming a developer and coming to the code, it was much easier for me to find certain things, and then understand why certain things are how they are.
Now as a developer, I’m able to make changes and add things to the software to make it better for the customer. It’s fun.
I love solving a problem. It motivates me. When I’ve been staring at a problem for a good 30 minutes, or an hour, or half a day, and it clicks and I finally understand it, and I code it and it works – that’s the best feeling when you solve a problem. I really love it.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a developer?
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and expect that failure is part of the learning process. Try new things, and take more risks. Don’t be too harsh on yourself if you don’t know something.
Before coming to Comet, I was always scared to fail, but now working here, everyone is so supportive and helpful. I feel safe enough here to take risks and make mistakes. That’s a really powerful feeling.
What keeps you interested and inspired in the field?
Software is never stagnant. It’s always improving. There’s always something new. It’s never boring, every single day you learn something new. There’s not one day that I’ve gone to work and been like ‘I knew everything today’. I don’t get bored, ever, there’s aways something new.
What are some of your interests or hobbies outside of work?
For work, we’re looking at our computers all day, so on the weekends and during my downtime I like to do things that don’t involve looking at a screen.
I love being outside, looking at the landscapes and mountains, going for a walk around the estuary and getting some fresh air.
Recently I’ve taken up boxing to do something physically demanding. I go to the 6:30am morning classes, they run for about an hour and it’s a nice way to start the day.
I also love to read. Reading is like my escape, it’s like you’re in a whole different world. Murder-mysteries are my go-to. It’s the satisfaction of putting the pieces together and solving the mystery, and sometimes there are curveballs that you just don’t expect.
Rice! There's been one week in my entire life when I didn't eat rice because I was in camp, but every single week of my life I've eaten rice. You can't have a complete meal without rice.
Do you have any favorite recipes you like to cook to go with rice?
We have a dish in the Philippines called sinigang, it's a sour and savory soup. Another dish is chicken adobo, which is soy sauce and vinegar mixed with milk. And it's so good, it’s one of my favorites.
IT Providers and MSPs can use Data Privacy Week as an opportunity to teach your clients about their data privacy and to remind end users to double check the information they are sharing on their apps and devices.
We’ve put together some information and resources to help you educate your end users.
Data is collected everyday – from your computer, smartphone, smartwatch, and pretty much every other internet-connected device. All of your online activity generates a trail of data.
Data Privacy Week acts as a reminder to double check and update the settings on your apps, accounts and connected devices to decide how this data is collected and used.
Even the tech titans like Apple are bowing to the importance of data privacy as evidenced by their 2020 decision to roll out the Apple App Tracking Transparency feature to iOS 14.5. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature allows users to choose whether an app can track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites for advertising targeting. The impact of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature upended the mobile ad industry, which largely relies on user data.
With the emergence of AI (artificial intelligence) and the ever-changing landscape of technology and cybersecurity, we expect to see more laws and regulations around data privacy, following the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 across Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2019 in the US.
But complying with regulations and relying on the tech industry to design better privacy controls isn’t enough. It’s important to proactively protect yourself, your clients and your company from unnecessary data collection.
The 2025 theme for Data Privacy Week is ‘Take Control of your Data’. Here are some easy tips and reminders from the NCA to help you manage your data privacy:
Know the trade-off between privacy and convenience – does each app or account need access to certain data (such as your contacts or photos or camera)?
Adjust privacy settings to your comfort level. Audit your apps, accounts, and double check the privacy and security settings on your devices.
Protect your data with several layers of security, including using secure passwords and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Install updates – as annoying as is to take time to update your software, it is important because updates help patch security flaws, deploy bug fixes, add new features, and help keep your devices running smoothly.
As we begin the new year, it’s a great time to look ahead and mark your calendar with key dates, including upcoming 2025 IT and cybersecurity holidays.
These holidays and awareness days are a fun opportunity to highlight and teach the importance of cybersecurity to your clients or end users, or show appreciation for your team.
The National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) organizes Data Privacy Week to spread awareness about the importance of safeguarding personal data and ensuring online data privacy and safety. Our data is collected everyday – from your computer, smartphone, smartwatch, and pretty much every other internet-connected device. You can check and update the settings on your apps and devices to decide how this data is collected and used.
National Clean Out Your Computer Day was started in 2000 as an initiative of the Institute for Business Technology and falls on the second Monday in February. The event promotes taking time out of your day to do some basic housekeeping on your computer, such as organizing your files and folders, updating software, and removing unused files. Before you delete any files, it’s a good idea to make sure you have a backup of your data, just in case! Don’t forget about wiping the outside of your device, and cleaning the screen and keyboard.
World Backup Day on March 31st is one of our favorite IT holidays on the calendar (for no specific reason). World Backup Day reminds us to backup and protect our data. In today’s digital age, data backup and data protection is critical for businesses and organisations to help protect against cyberattacks, ransomware, system crashes, human error, and more. Having a robust and secure backup solution, like Comet Backup, will help safeguard against these data loss threats.
World Password Day is celebrated annually on the first Thursday of May to encourage people to use stronger passwords and secure their online accounts. Strong passwords are important for protecting sensitive information and preventing unauthorized access. For another layer of protection you can also use two-factor authentication (2FA) to secure your accounts for better security.
System Administrator Appreciation Day (SysAdmin Day) honors IT professionals who work behind the scenes to keep our IT systems, networks, servers, and technology running smoothly at businesses and organizations across the world. Shout out to our everyday IT heroes!
We celebrate IT Professionals Day on the third Tuesday of September to recognize the technical IT experts that make sure our systems run smoothly. Whether its desktops, laptops, mobile devices, printers, applications, servers, networks, databases or cybersecurity, IT professionals keep our businesses humming. IT Pro Day recognizes the critically important role of these technical experts.
In October, Cybersecurity Awareness Month is an international initiative that educates everyone about online safety and empowers individuals and businesses to protect their data from cybercrime. Cybersecurity Awareness Month reminds everyone that there are simple, effective ways to keep yourself safe online, protect your personal and business data, and ultimately help secure our world.
Computer Security Day was first launched in 1988 by the Association for Computer Security. Since then, the way we use computers has changed. Today, we use computers to stay connected almost every day – working from home, shopping online, internet banking, streaming movies, social media, and more. Computer Security Day encourages individuals and businesses to adopt good virtual habits and be proactive in protecting your data in our modern digital world.
While National Cookie Day is not necessarily a conventional IT awareness day, we like to celebrate it each year on December 4th as a reminder to clear your cache and cookies on your web browser. Clearing your cache and cookies can help improve your browser’s performance, protect your privacy by reducing tracking, and free up a little bit of space on your computer.
No matter what time of the year, it’s always important to be proactive and take action to keep ourselves and our organizations safe by backing up data, securing accounts, using strong passwords, and having good cyber hygiene and habits.
If you are looking for a fast and secure backup solution, you can test drive Comet Backup with a 30-day FREE trial! Start running backups and restores in 15 minutes or less.
As 2024 wraps up, we want to thank all our partners and the Comet community for your support. Here's to a productive 2025!
It's been a big year at Comet and we want to take a moment to reflect and celebrate some of our highlights from 2024. The Comet community is at the center of everything we do. We've rolled out new product features and enhancements, solved issues, and kept things moving in support and customer success. In early December, we hosted our end of year company conference, CometCon.
Let's take a look at some of the big Comet news and achievements from 2024.
In November, Comet added Linux Disk Image which is a major highlight for us. With Linux Disk Image you can protect all of your Linux devices and eliminate the hassle of reinstalling and configuring devices from scratch when a disaster occurs. If you'd like to know more about Linux Disk Image, you can read our blog post about it here.
In May, we improved our Hyper-V Protected Item by adding Changed Block Tracking (CBT) support for Hyper-V virtual machines. Hyper-V CBT performs efficient backups of Hyper-V virtual machines by only reading blocks of a virtual disk that have changed since the last backup job. This means Hyper-V backups complete faster and upload less data.
In August, we rolled out our new feature to configure how often a backup job should retry when it encounters an issue. When a backup job encounters an issue, it can lead to manual interventions or escalations to your technical team. Both of these are time consuming and frustrating when they occur.
Our new Configurable Retries feature allows you to configure how many times a backup should attempt to retry when an error occurs, and how long it should wait to retry the job again. When this feature is configured, Comet will not mark a backup job as failed if it going to retry again later. Instead it will be marked as "Running (retry)" so you are able to see that Comet is still trying to get a successful backup.
Comet-Hosted is our turnkey backup solution, designed to help partners quickly set up and start running backups with ease. In 2024, we've added support for Comet-Hosted Servers to be created in London (Europe) and Sydney (Australia). This means customers in London or Australia who have compliance requirements or wanted their Comet-Hosted Server to be located closer to their customers can now use Comet-Hosted.
Don't forget to visit our Feature Voting page to share your ideas or vote on existing ones. We regularly use this feedback to shape our development priorities.
We're keeping our 2025 plans under wraps for the moment. We are excited to share more of our plans with you soon.
We’re back with the fifth edition of CometCon, this time a mini 3-day version of our company-wide internal conference. Twice a year, local and remote team members gather at Comet HQ for CometCon for team bonding, fun activities, presentations, and collaboration.
Here are some highlights of our end of year CometCon:
At each CometCon, team members from each department are welcome to lead a presentation or workshop. This time we had six different talks from the Marketing, Product, Developer, Software Testing, Sales, and Customer Success teams.
Sharing knowledge and insights cross-functionally is always a big part of CometCon. Many of the presentations focused on how we can improve the product and experience for our Comet Community.
One of our favorite parts of CometCon is getting everyone together to hangout and connect throughout the week. While those of us at Comet HQ enjoy our hybrid model of working a few days in the office and a few days remote each week, it’s valuable for everyone to spend dedicated time together, especially for the fully remote team members.
During CometCon the dev teams can have their standup meetings in person, discuss and workshop ideas, and have water cooler chats (or in our case, coffee machine chat), things you can’t replicate as naturally over Slack. We believe important topics get surfaced and new ideas are sparked in a deeply human way when we gather together in person.
It wouldn’t be CometCon without some fun team activities! We headed off-site to a local café for a mystery event lead by our General Manager, Josh. This team activity involved creative problem solving, brainstorming ideas, and teamwork.
Next, we headed over to a Battle Axe Throwing spot for a bit of fun. We channeled our inner Viking / lumberjack and teamed up for a few games. Flannel was worn. Axes were thrown. Fun was had by everyone.
Earlier this year we started a new initiative, Team Nominations, where we acknowledge our teammates at Comet. At the end of each month, anyone at the company can submit a Team Nomination to give kudos and shoutouts to someone they work with who they feel deserves to be recognized for their work. The nominees are given a shout out during our Friday team meeting at the end of each month, and a prize goes to the top nominee. Congratulations to this year’s winners!
There’s always such a buzz in the office for the week of CometCon, and this mini CometCon was no exception. It was great to get everyone together for collaboration, connection, and celebration as we wrap up 2024 and look forward to next year. We can’t wait to bring you on the journey with us for what’s next for Comet in 2025!
Comet 24.11.0 Dione, our latest Quarterly release, brings 11 new features and 16 enhancements, including Disk Image for Linux, restoring Disk Image backups to Hyper-V VHDX file format, bulk action improvements and more.
The full set of changes can be found in the release notes.
This Quarterly release is named after Saturn's moon Dione. Fun fact: This moon hides a cool secret. Underneath its thick, frozen crust, scientists believe Dione harbors a subsurface ocean, much like its famous neighbor Enceladus. This hidden ocean makes Dione a surprising contender in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Join us for our Quarterly webinar on Tuesday 10 December (3pm EST / 12pm PST)](https://app.livestorm.co/comet-backup/quarterly-releases)! Comet's CTO, Mason and Product Engineering Manager, Callum will cover all the latest product updates, with a live question-and-answer session at the end.
Your input is an important part of what we decide to build at Comet. Disk Image for Linux was a highly upvoted request in our Feature Voting system, so we're excited to share this new backup type with the Comet community.
Linux Disk Image allows you to protect your Linux computers and servers. If your endpoint goes down (with ransomware, hardware failure or human error), having a Disk Image backup allow you to restore to a previous state on a new machine, eliminating the hassle of reinstalling and configuring devices from scratch when a disaster occurs.
Bare-Metal Backup: Protect entire disks and partitions for full system recovery.
Restore Anywhere: Bring your system back to life on physical hardware, virtual machines or even the cloud.
Granular Restore: Quickly restore files and/or folders from the backup when key files need to be recovered.
When setting up Linux Disk Image, you are able to choose what disks and/or partitions you want to protect. Once you've selected what you'd like to protect, all of the data is deduplicated, compressed, and encrypted as it is backed up on the fly. This means all of your data is secure as it is uploaded and less storage space is used to store the backup.
You are able to restore a Disk Image backup to physical hardware, a Hyper-V VM or a VMware VM. Comet's flexible Disk Image recovery options give you full control over how the Linux endpoint is restored.
If you'd like more information about Linux Disk Image, check out our blog post here
Linux Disk Image is available in Comet 24.9.8 or later.
When restoring a Disk Image backup (for both Windows and Linux), there is a new option to restore the data in Hyper-V VHDX file format, which eliminates the need to manually convert our Disk Image virtual disk files into a format Hyper-V will boot from. This is a great improvement to our Disk Image recovery environment as you can restore backed up devices to Hyper-V even faster.
The conversion happens on-the-fly as part of the restore process. The resulting file can be used immediately in Hyper-V, or uploaded to Microsoft Azure to boot in a cloud virtual machine allowing you to restore any Disk Image backup quickly.
This joins our existing support for restoring Disk Image backups to VMware ESXi-compatible files.
User Policies are a great way to restrict what a user can and can't do. For example, you can prevent new Protected Items from being created, or ensure the main disk drive on everyone's laptop is always protected.
We've extended the "Bulk Actions" button on the Users page to support assigning user policies in bulk. This is great for organisations that require the same rules to be applied to a large number of users.
We are pleased to announce that Comet-Hosted is now available to be hosted in Australia. Comet admin now have the choice of five geographically diverse locations to choose from when selecting where their Comet-Hosted server should be located.
Comet works with a wide range of service providers, from highly managed to low-touch, and everywhere in-between. If you are a service provider who offers the software directly, you may be want to restrict your customer from backing up additional virtual machines. To support this, we have added a quota feature for the number of Virtual Machines:
Adding this quota limit to your customer accounts will ensure that as a service provider, you are in control of how many Virtual Machines your customers are allowed to backup.
When setting up a Self-Hosted Management Console for the first time, customers will now be asked to configure the default admin account details in the setup wizard or when first opening the web interface. This redesign encourages first time Comet admins to configure memorable admin account login details.
Bare-Metal backup and restores for Linux is now available in Comet 24.9.8 or later. With Linux Disk Image you can protect all of your Linux devices and eliminate the hassle of reinstalling and configuring devices from scratch when a disaster occurs.
If you'd like to watch a video guide of our Disk Image Protected Item, check it out here.
Bare-Metal Backup: Protect entire disks and partitions for full system recovery.
Restore Anywhere: Bring your system back to life on physical hardware, virtual machines or even the cloud.
Granular Restore: Quickly restore files and/or folders from the backup when key files need to be recovered.
When setting up Linux Disk Image, you are able to choose what disks and/or partitions you want to protect. Once you've selected what you'd like to protect, all of the data is deduplicated, compressed, and encrypted as it is backed up on the fly. This means all of your data is secure as it is uploaded and less storage space is used to store the backup.
Backing up your Linux endpoints with Linux Disk Image does not require any additional storage space for spooling (temporary storage). The snapshot of the disk is taken and uploaded without the need for additional temporary storage drives.
To get started backing up your Linux devices, all you need to do is download and install Comet on the device and configure a Disk Image Protected Item.
backupsnap61 is a custom Linux kernel driver provided by Comet that can snapshot any block device. If it is installed, it will be used to snapshot the block device for backup.
The benefit of installing our custom backupsnap61 driver is:
Ensures that snapshots of all partitions can be taken, especially if they are mounted.
Skips efficiently over unused disk space, significantly improving backup performance for disks with large unused sectors.
Before the custom backupsnap61 driver can be installed, your Linux device will need to be running Kernel 5.9 or later and have Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS).
A copy of the backupsnap61 installer is bundled with Comet Backup. To install this driver, simply run ./backupsnap61-install.sh from your Comet Backup install directory.
Comet can also take disk snapshots using other methods, which is covered in our docs here.
To assist with restoring to a physical Linux endpint, a bootable Linux recovery environment with Comet pre-installed can be created and written to a USB.
After the USB has been created, all you need is to plug it in to the physical machine you want to restore the data to and boot from the USB. Then you can use Comet to select where you'd like to restore the data to. To learn more about restoring a Disk Image backup to a physical machine you can check out our docs here or our walkthrough here.
Adding Disk Image for Linux was a highly upvoted request from our Feature Voting system. We encourage you to check out this system and let your voice be heard - at the time of writing, we have completed over 180 user feature requests. Your votes are one of the things we take into consideration when building our product roadmap.
"What's New?" is a series of blog posts covering recent changes to Comet in more detail. This article covers the latest changes in Comet Voyager over September and October 2024.
During September and October we shipped four and six Comet releases respectively. The releases were primarily in our Voyager series with the exception of one update per month for the Tethys release series.
Let's take a look at some of the new features and enhancements added over this period:
When going to restore a Disk Image backup, there is a new option to restore the data in Hyper-V VHDX file format:
The disk format conversion happens on-the-fly as part of the restore process. It does not require any additional temporary disk space or memory. The resulting VHDX file can be used immediately in Hyper-V, or uploaded to Microsoft Azure to boot in a cloud virtual machine.
This joins our existing support for restoring Disk Image backups to VMware ESXi-compatible VMDK files, which works in the same streaming way without any temporary disk requirements.
This new capability was a highly upvoted request from our Feature Voting system. We encourage you to check out this system and let your voice be heard - at the time of writing, we have completed over 180 user feature requests. The votes are not the only thing we base our decision-making on, but they are an important input into the process.
When restoring Disk Image backups to physical hardware, using Recovery Media is essential in order to allow overwriting the device's primary operating system partition. Users of the Disk Image Protected Item can enjoy another new feature this month: the ability to use the Create Recovery Media feature when the Comet Backup desktop app is running on Linux.
Comet's current billing model for Hyper-V and VMware Protected Items has a component based on the number of guest Virtual Machines included in the backup. Comet works with a wide range of service providers, both highly managed and low-touch, and everywhere in-between. If you are a service provider who offers the software directly, you may be surprised to find your customer backing up additional virtual machines and causing a rise in your Comet Backup bill. To help mitigate this, we have added a quota feature for the number of Virtual Machines:
Adding this quota limit to your customer accounts will ensure that as a service provider, you do not receive any unexpected charges for your users.
In the 24.9.x Voyager series, we have made additional improvements for the Hyper-V and VMware Protected Items:
When restoring data from a Hyper-V, VMware, or Disk Image Protected Item type, Comet offers a granular restore option, to extract individual files from an NTFS, EXT4, XFS, or FAT partition. This allows you to back up only the full disk image while maintaining the ability to rapidly recovery individual files.
If you use the "Latest VM State" backup option in Comet, this produces a single VHDX file inside the Storage Vault. However, if you back up Hyper-V using the "All VM Checkpoints" option, running the backup job in Comet will produce a base VHDX file and a chain of differencing disks in AVHDX format. In this case, a limitation in Comet meant that only the base VHDX file was supported for granular restore. For many service providers who do not actively maintain their checkpoint trees, this could result in only a surprisingly older file being available for granular restore. Now, in the latest 24.9.x versions of Comet, this limitation has been lifted, allowing you to perform granular restore even from each AVHDX checkpoint file.
The VMware Protected Item only had the "Latest VM State" option available and so was not affected by this limitation.
In 24.9.x, VMware users can enjoy simplified configuration as we have consolidated to supporting only the vSphere API, not any of the previous beta connection formats.
When going to restore data, you can control what happens if you restore data over the top of existing files on disk. Some common choices are to replace the existing file with the restore file; or, to skip restoring the file if an existing file is already present.
However, even if you instruct Comet to overwrite existing files on disk, an issue can occur if the existing file on disk has been set as read-only in the operating system. By default, Comet respects this setting and refuses to overwrite the existing file in this case. Respecting the file permissions is a sensible baseline behaviour, but we have encountered situations where Comet should restore the file regardless. As a result, the Comet 24.9.x Voyager series introduces a new "Allow read-only files to be overwritten" advanced option when restoring data, to bypass read-only file permissions.
Comet Server has many features to make it easier for a service provider to administer a large user base. In the latest 24.9.x Voyager series, we've extended the "Bulk Actions" button on the Users page to support assigning user policies in bulk.
Policies are specific to a given Tenant. In previous versions of Comet, there were some situations by which the top-level administrator could assign a top-level policy to a Tenant, in a way that would have required the Tenant to access a policy existing outside their own Tenant. To clear up this edge case, when upgrading to the latest 24.9.x versions of Comet, any such policies will be copied into the target Tenant, ensuring that Tenants have tightly bounded permissions that only provide access to their own policies.
Larger service providers with multiple Comet Servers, used in a cluster with replication and/or constellation, may also appreciate the new ability to copy and paste your server settings from one Comet Server to another. This feature is also particularly helpful when migrating between the Self-Hosted and Comet-Hosted servers.
Comet has supported backing up MySQL and compatible (e.g. MariaDB) databases ever since our earliest releases. The MySQL Protected Item type is based on the mysqldump technology in a special way that streams the database dump directly through our chunking deduplication engine and into the Storage Vault location, without needing any temporary files or spool space.
In the many years since the MySQL Protected Item was first launched, the available MySQL and MySQL-compatible engines have diverged in terms of feature set and functionality. For example, MariaDB introduced JSON functionality prior to MySQL's implementation, and feature differences persist to this day between these two major players. Therefore, to achieve a high fidelity backup job, it is important that Comet finds a copy of the mysqldump tool that is appropriately specialized for your database to support all of its latest particular features.
In the event that mysqldump cannot be found on the system, Comet will proceed with the backup job using a bundled fallback version. This fallback is not specialized for any particular version of MySQL and may be missing support for advanced database features.
In the latest 24.9.x versions of Comet, we have extended this fallback system from only applying on Windows, to now also applying on Linux and macOS devices. Comet now also adds a notice into the MySQL backup job logs if the fallback tool is being used. This can help alert you to the fact that the backup job may be operating at a lower fidelity.
Comet is used by service providers of many different sizes. Many service providers choose to use the Comet Server web interface to remotely manage their customer base; the Comet Backup desktop app is also available for self-service. Depending on your focus as a service provider, you may use Policy controls to allow or prevent end-user access to the Comet Backup desktop app.
Throughout September and October, the Comet Backup desktop app has been improved to better show cross-device names in the Activity Log dialog. This includes both a new Device Name column, and, support for showing the Protected Item names from other devices.
The Comet Backup desktop app also allows the end-user to configure their own email reports. This month, the email filters for "Time since job start" and "Time since job end" have been improved to more easily allow configuring the seconds, minutes, hours and days for the time range query.
Troubleshooting customer backup jobs is an essential part of being a service provider. The 24.9.x Voyager series of Comet includes many small changes that may make this important job a little easier.
There has been a focus on improving how Comet connects to SMB network shares. On the Protected Item side, when using the "Log in to a network share" option in a Files and Folders Protected Item, a "Test Connection" button is now offered. When using a File and Folder Storage Vault on an SMB location, the Test Connection button now more accurately represents the service user account that would perform backup and restore operations. Additionally, our dedicated SMB Storage Vault type has also been improved to seamlessly handle both domain- and workstation-based authentication, using standard Microsoft syntax.
When the Comet Backup desktop app tries to test a connection and encounters a failing error, an extra info tooltip now appears, to show you additional information when hovering over it with the mouse cursor. If the Test Connection button had been explicitly clicked, a popup will show you the full error message in its complete detail.
When looking at a backup job log, Comet will now display additional progress information during some long-running Object Lock operations. This can help you identify any performance bottlenecks you may be facing. Additionally, when viewed in the Comet Server web interface, if a given backup job was prevented from running by another job taking place to the same Storage Vault at the same time, a banner message will now show you information about the conflicting job, helping you to easily identify and resolve the cause of the conflict.
Building upon our key focus from the 24.8 Tethys release series, the 24.9.x Voyager series this quarter has continued to prioritize work on bugfixes and reliability improvements. To date, this quarter's Voyager series has included fixes for over 50 issues, ranging from minor cosmetic to important functionality.
Our Office 365 Protected Item type has seen another major improvement, making incremental backups of Calendars, Contacts, and Messages more efficient and faster.
Comet is now much more resilient at handling certain types of network interruptions. When a large network download is interrupted, Comet is now able to resume from the point of failure in more cases, rather than needing to restart the entire transfer. Similarly if a Storage Vault has many concurrent jobs running, Comet is now more able to anticipate file changes within a remote Storage Vault and continue its operation. This can improve the performance of connecting to a Storage Vault at the start of a backup or restore job.
