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.
We sat down for a chat with Leandra Lombard, our Office Administrator who has been with the company since August 2022. This piece has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
So I had to go and hunt down your actual job title for this piece because internally we just affectionally refer to your title as Mama Bear. What does your role entail?
Yes, I am known as the office Mama Bear. I look after everyone, so sort of office manager meets people manager.
It's a mixture of paying the bills, doing payroll, taking care of the office, making sure there are snacks and supplies, spear heading wellness initiatives, checking in with people and seeing how they're doing, general admin tasks, and event planning.
Twice a year we have a week-long event called CometCon. We get all our remote team members into the Christchurch office for team building events, educational talks, and time to socialize. I ensure everything runs smoothly for those events, from flights and accommodation to making sure there are delicious meals, to booking fun, team-building activities.
During my first phone interview with Josh, our General Manager, he was so real and down to earth. There was no pretence, and I loved that. When I had my second interview, as soon as I walked into the office, I knew I wanted to be here.
The leadership team really look at people, not just their job titles or skills on paper, but who you are as a person and if there is a strong cultural fit. I love that about Comet.
I've worked in many different capacities in different companies and industries, but I have not encountered a culture like Comet before. Everyone is so welcoming and accepting. You can really be yourself and feel like you belong. We like to have fun, work hard, and take care of each other.
The biggest thing is the people. Absolutely. Everyone is so genuine and accepting. They talk about companies being like families but for a lot of companies, it's all talk, no show. Comet really does feel like a little family. In the best way. Without any crazy aunts.
Why is wellness so important to you and for the company?
It’s important to me because I’ve seen what a difference it makes when people get the right nutrition, proper rest, and some sunshine. It impacts not only physical, but mental health as well. For some people, it can be life changing. By emphasizing wellness and giving the team weekly tips and reminders, I feel like I can make a difference in people’s lives and wellbeing.
What are some of the health and wellness initiatives at Comet?
One initiative we have implemented at Comet is that the company pays for our employees to have health insurance through Southern Cross. Included in that is an add-on Keeping Well module designed to encourage people to eat well, move more, and take care of themselves.
Every week we have free fresh fruit in the office. We also have an entire Slack channel dedicated to Wellness to share information such as YouTube videos, resources, healthy recipes, and to discuss different wellness topics and ideas. At the Friday all-hands meetings, I’ll go over one of those tips each week.
When it comes to sharing healthy recipes, I am a huge fan of Nadia Lim, a chef from New Zealand. She does healthy in a holistic, delicious way which makes it more fun.
I’d also recommend the Mindset Mentor podcast by Rob Dial. It’s all about mindset, growth, mental health, and wellness. It gives me reminders to keep checking in on myself and be kind to others and myself.
What are some of your interests or hobbies outside of work?
Working part time hours at Comet affords me the time to volunteer on Tuesdays as a stylist for Dress for Success. It’s an incredible organization of women helping other women thrive by achieving economic independence through professional development tools and programs.
I am originally from South Africa. What I love about living in Christchurch is the freedom and the safety I feel here.
Having been through the earthquakes and seeing how Christchurch pulled together to help each other, how neighbours were looking after each other, and people were taking strangers into their homes, seeing the sense of community and how strong it is here is something I truly value.
We know everyone at Comet loves food. Do you have a favorite recipe you like to cook?
I love making a slow cooker chili. It has about 10 different kinds of vegetables, legumes, and a little bit of meat. It is delicious, freezes well for meal prep, and you can just heat it up and put some avocado and tomato on top for a quick, healthy and delicious meal.
Eat the fruits and vegetables. Prioritize sleep. Get some sunshine. Go for a walk. Take your breaks…all the things we know we should do but sometimes forget or deprioritize.
Remember, we are all doing the best we can, some days are going to be amazing, and some days won't. Allow yourself to be okay with that and give yourself a break sometimes.
Today we are announcing new pricing plans. Comet has always been a flexible platform, and we want to make it easier for you to build out the backup environment that’s best for your business.
The Comet community is at the heart of everything we do. We’re committed to our mission of helping MSPs provide great backup services. We recognize that different partners have different needs. With that in mind, we have designed plans that fit various use cases and allow businesses to scale and grow.
We’re introducing five different tiers, with options to suit a variety of deployments. Plans are based on configuration and usage of management consoles, devices, and boosters. Only pay for what you use, with no hidden fees.
You can choose your pricing plan in the billing section of the account dashboard here.
If you need help selecting a plan, feel free to reach out to our team and we’d be happy to discuss your specific business requirements.
If you want to migrate from Self-Hosted to Comet-Hosted, you can use our new migration tool with these step-by-step instructions. Or you can raise a support ticket for assistance with the process.
Our team is here to help if you have questions or need assistance selecting the best plan for your business. Get in touch with us at partners@cometbackup.com.
What are the differences between the pricing plans?
The pricing plans are based on configuration and usage of management console licenses, devices, and boosters. These plans are designed to be flexible for different use cases and backup environments. You can read about the plans in more detail and compare them here.
I’m a Comet-Hosted customer, how does this change affect me?
Our Professional plan is designed for most Comet-Hosted customers. On this plan there are no changes to your monthly costs or features.
If you use both Comet-Hosted and Self-Hosted, the Advanced plan is best suited to your needs. Check out this detailed comparison chart to learn more.
I’m a Self-Hosted customer, how does this change affect me?
Our Starter, Growth and Advanced plans are all designed for Self-Hosted customers. Check out this detailed comparison chart to learn more.
Yes, you can upgrade your plan in the billing section of your account at any time. If you want to downgrade your plan, please contact our team partners@cometbackup.com for assistance.
Yes, the migration tool is ready. The migration process will likely take about 10-20 minutes, with little to no interruption to your customers and services. You can either run the migration yourself with these step-by-step instructions. Or you can raise a support ticket for assistance with the process.
Do note that using a Comet-Hosted Server will incur a $49 monthly fee, and there are some differences in feature between a Comet-Hosted and Self-Hosted Server. Please check out the features parity in our product page.
If you haven’t selected a plan, one of our account managers will review your account and move you onto the plan that best aligns with your usage. If you’d like to change your plan after that, you can upgrade your plan in the billing section of your account at any time. If you want to downgrade your plan, please contact our team partners@cometbackup.com for assistance.
What is the difference between Comet-Hosted (cloud-hosted) and Self-Hosted?
Comet-Hosted is automatically configured and is cloud-hosted, with no system requirements, and has fully managed quarterly updates, so it is easy to maintain.
Self-Hosted is our more customizable option. It can be hosted anywhere including on-prem or in the cloud, which makes it more flexible in complying with regulatory requirements.
It’s that time of year again, the leaves are changing color, pumpkin spice lattes are back on the menu, and Halloween is approaching. October is also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an international initiative that educates people about online safety and empowers individuals and businesses to protect their data from cybercrime.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month was launched by the National Cybersecurity Alliance and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in October 2004 as a dedicated month to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity. October 2024 marks the 21st Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
How MSPs and IT Providers Can Observe Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a great opportunity for MSPs and IT Providers to remind end users and clients about how they can stay safe online. It’s also a great time to audit and review your clients’ security situations and educate them on the importance of cybersecurity and a strong backup solution.
The enduring theme for Cybersecurity Awareness Month is Secure Our World. This theme recognizes the importance of taking daily action to reduce risks when online and connected to devices. Below are the simple actions we should all take not only during October, but every day throughout the year to stay safe online.
Here are some simple tips to remind end users and clients how they can protect themselves and their data online.
Use Strong and Unique Passwords – A strong password should be long, random, unique, and include all four character types, including uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols. Password managers are a powerful and useful tool to help you create and maintain strong passwords for reach of your accounts.
Turn on Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – MFA refers to the separate methods of verifying one’s identity in order to access an account. This may include logging into an account with a password and then re-confirming with an authentication code. Enabling MFA offers an extra layer of protection.
Recognize & Report Phishing Scams – Learn how to stay alert for phishing attacks, which refer to the attempt to trick people into sharing valuable data or visiting malware-infected websites.
Keep Your Software Updated – Updating your software regularly ensures that you have the latest security patches, bug fixes, and updates on your devices and apps. Having outdated software may be a vulnerability that a cyber-criminal could exploit.
One critical aspect of cybersecurity that MSPs should highlight is the importance of having a reliable backup solution. While cybersecurity efforts focus on preventing breaches, attacks such as ransomware or phishing incidents can still happen, and when they do, a strong backup system can be a lifesaver.
MSPs should use Cybersecurity Awareness Month to remind clients that a proactive cybersecurity plan must include both defensive measures and a strong data backup strategy. By having secure and frequent backups, organizations can mitigate the worst effects of an attack and bounce back faster, saving time and money.
We sat down for a chat with Darwin Dingel, one of our Developer Team Leaders who has been with the company since March 2022. This piece has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I enjoy playing lots of basketball. I have two kids, my son is nine and my daughter is five. Sometimes I play video games with the kids.
With the family, during summer we try to get out and go camping. We’re just starting to do some easy overnight hikes all together.
Can you tell me a little bit about your background?
I'm originally from the Philippines. After a couple of years of working, I moved to Malaysia for half a year, then I moved to Singapore for five years. After that my wife got a software testing job in New Zealand and we moved here. We’ve been in Christchurch for 11 years now.
You came to Comet with a lot of experience. What’s it like to change industries?
Prior to Comet, I worked on embedded systems – so mostly programming on chips, a more hardware-based application. I was in that field for about a decade and I was looking to do something different.
Sometimes it’s hard to make that change if you’ve been in one situation for a long time; people might think you are only an expert in that one area. Before I left my previous role, I was already studying other programming languages to be able to shift to another product.
You can feel how human the company is. Sometimes when you're in a company, you know that you turn out work, but you don’t see the impact of that work. At Comet, there is the feeling that customers are not just an account number, they are actual people and businesses that we are trying to help. So, that's really refreshing for me.
I moved from a product where you can’t really see your work – you just see a device there with blinking lights. But with Comet, you can see the differences you’re making with the software and how that’s helping the IT professionals we work with.
I love how we prioritize the customer experience. It’s not, “How are we going to get more money out of this somewhere?” It’s more about, “How do we help the customers get the most out of our product” and actually helping people.
How would you describe the team culture at Comet?
It's really people centric, which is very refreshing. The people at Comet are really nice. When I first started, I was nervous because I was shifting to a new field. During your first week at Comet, you have pre-scheduled “get-to-know-you” catch-ups with lots of team members. Those informal chats were really nice and immediately helped put me at ease.
As a father, I have to be a bit flexible because the kids’ schedules sometimes change. Comet is great about that. We’re allowed a lot of flexibility to prioritize family.
I also enjoy the mix of working two days a week remotely and a few days where you meet people in the office; it’s a good balance.
Can you tell us about how you became a Dev Team Lead?
I first started at Comet as a developer. I led the VMware project last year. Then an opportunity came up, Comet was growing and work was going to begin being divided between two dev teams. I was promoted to lead one of those teams.
Both teams work cross-functionally across the entire product. Some developers do have in-depth expertise in certain areas, but the goal is to cross-train the teams so we’re never overly reliant on a single person for one area.
Our developers work on multiple parts of the product, and because you get exposed to more parts of the system, you learn a lot really quickly.
As a Team Lead, I facilitate the Astro Dev team’s daily stand up meetings and one-on-ones with each of those developers. Each morning I look through our team’s project management board for progress updates, checking in on tasks that need attention and helping to unblock work. Then I run through any support tickets that have been escalated for dev work. After that I jump into my own development tasks.
What's your favorite part of being a team leader?
It’s exciting to be more across all areas and getting to know how things work. As a developer, you get assigned tasks and focus on that area until you’re finished with a project. As a Team Lead, I enjoy being exposed to other parts of code that I wouldn’t otherwise be asked to look at. I like having a high level understanding of what’s happening across the product, it’s really interesting.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a developer ?
Just get started, and keep learning. There are so many resources on the internet now, you can start learning anything you want on YouTube. Then there are open source tools, including many of the tools being used by developers in corporate, so you can get started really quickly.
You will fail at times, and the good thing about it is that you can start again, just keep going and keep learning.
National IT Professionals Day, or IT Pro Day, is celebrated annually on the third Tuesday in September and recognizes the technical experts and the critical role IT plays in our modern world. National IT Professionals Day was originally created in 2015 by SolarWinds, an IT management software provider. This year IT Pro Day falls on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.
IT Professionals are the technical experts who make sure our networks and systems run smoothly and play a crucial role in managing and securing technology environments within businesses and organizations.
Whether it’s desktops, laptops, mobile devices, servers, networks, databases, applications, or cybersecurity, IT professionals keep our organizations going.
These are some common roles within the IT industry:
Here are some ideas on how to celebrate and acknowledge the everyday IT heroes in your life:
Remember your password and use the password manager
Submit a support ticket instead of sending a DM or emailing IT directly
Restart your computer and make sure the software is up to date before asking IT for help
Complete the cybersecurity trainings and do not click on phishing emails
Do your best to avoid spilling coffee on your laptop or keyboard
In all seriousness, we appreciate all the hard work that talented IT professionals do every single day. IT professionals and technical experts are essential to the success of every part of an organization, no matter how big or small.
To celebrate IT Pro Day, you can also give a shout out to your favorite IT person, buy them a coffee (or a snack), and thank them for keeping our systems operating and running 24/7.
We're very pleased to announce our latest Quarterly release series - Comet 24.8 Tethys. This is the the latest entry in our quarterly rollup series, that branches off from our main rolling Voyager development into a fixed target for you to qualify and build your service offering upon.
Tethys is a moon of Saturn and is named after the Titan from Greek mythology. The best photos and scientific data about Tethys come from the 2015 visit by the Cassini spacecraft, named after Giovanni Cassini who discovered Tethys in the 1680s. Tethys was thought to be the closest moon to Saturn for 100 years, until Mimas and Enceladus were discovered in the 1780s, pushing Tethys out to third place. Tethys' orbit is still close enough to Saturn that it passes right through Saturn's magnetosphere. On Earth this would make for a dazzling aurora, but Saturn's auroras are only visible in UV light.
Tethys is a lot smaller than our own moon, at only 1% of the mass, and it seems to be almost entirely made of water ice. The nearby moon Enceladus has geysers that spray ice out into space, and this tends to create a thin ring around Saturn of ice particles. Tethys orbits right through this area and is sandblasted by these ice particles, making Tethys extremely shiny and and reflective.
As for the software, Comet 24.8.0 Tethys brings 7 new features and 25 enhancements, including support for advanced Windows metadata; granular restore from Linux filesystems; additional retry features; the ability to bulk convert from Storage Role to direct-to-cloud storage; and much more.
The full set of changes can be found in the release notes.
If you'd prefer to watch rather than read, we're hosting a webinar to discuss this new quarterly release and all the new changes. Please register before we go live on Tuesday 10 September (4pm EDT / 1pm PDT) to catch up on all the latest Comet news with Comet's CTO, Mason and Product Engineering Manager, Callum. As usual, there will be time for a live question-and-answer session at the end of the presentation.
As well as that, we have many more videos available on our website, including guides on getting started with Comet, individual features, demonstrations with our technology partners, and webinars for previous quarterly software releases.
When a backup fails, it can lead to manual interventions or escalations to your technical team. Both of these are time consuming and frustrating when they occur. To prevent this, Comet retries 1000s of times during a backup to make sure it succeeds. Comet does this by retrying S3 APIs to make sure uploads and downloads succeed, as well as retrying any network errors that we determine as retryable.
Even though Comet has 1000s of retries within a backup, errors that can cause a backup to fail are inevitable. This can be from many various and often external factors such as service disruptions or hardware failures. When a backup fails due to these errors, often restarting the backup will succeed.
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.
It is important to note, that when Comet retries a job using this feature it needs to rescan all of the data in the Protected Item again. This is because it starts the job again from scratch. This does not mean all of your data will be uploaded again as Comet makes use of client-side deduplication and compression. This means that only the changes that weren't uploaded in previous attempts will be uploaded to the Storage Vault.
You can configure the new retry feature in two different ways. The first is by policy. You are able to configure per policy how long Comet should wait after a bacukup job fails, as well as how many times Comet will retry a failing backup job before it reports the error status. When a user has this policy applied, all Protected Items configured for this user will have the new retry feature applied.
You can also configure this feature per Protected Item. This provides you with a lot of flexibility as you can select Protected Items you would like to retry, rather than applying it to all Protected Items configured for a user.
To do this, you will see a new option on the Protected Item Schedule
Overall, this is a great new addition to Comet as it allows our MSPs to have Protected Items dynamically retry when an error occurs. This will help reduce the number of escalations to technical teams for intermittent issues.
In Comet 24.8 Tethys, Comet users will be able to restore Windows Disk Image backups directly from a Linux device. This makes cross-platform data recovery a lot easier as you no longer need a Windows device to restore Windows Disk Image backups.
To restore Windows Disk Image backups from Linux, you can use the Comet Backup desktop app or the Comet Server web interface. Because the Disk Image backup will have been performed by another device, you will need to login to the Linux device using the same username and password as the Windows device. This will allow you to restore Protected Items from other devices. The examples below are from the Comet Backup desktop app running on Ubuntu.
Once you have selected the Windows Disk Image Protected Item you would like to restore from you have four different methods to recover the files. These are restore to physical device(s), restore as virtual disk files, granular restore and restore as VMware virtual disks.
Restoring to physical device(s) allows you to write the data directly to a physical or virtual drive that is connected to the Linux device. You can then use the drive to boot the restored Windows device.
Restoring as virtual disk files allows you to create a VMDK file that contains all of the restored data. You can then load the VMDK into your preferred hypervisor such as VMware ESXi to boot the restored Windows device.
Granular restore allows you to recover a selection of Files and Folders without having to restore or boot the whole disk. This is great if you just need to grab a couple of important files quickly without having to restore the entire Windows device.
Restoring as a VMware virtual disk is similar to our virtual disk restore mode, except it converts the VMDK into a format that is bootable by VMware without any other steps required.
Each of these options provide you with flexibility to recover data from our Windows Disk Image Protected Item, whether it's the entire device, or just a couple of urgent files you need to grab.
Linux Based USB Recovery Media For Windows Disk Image Backups
We are excited to introduce a new Linux based recovery media to restore Windows Disk Image Protected Items. Prior to Comet 24.8 Tethys, creating USB recovery media relied heavily relied on Windows to create a small ISO with Comet pre-installed to restore Disk Image backups.
The Windows based recovery environments relied on WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) or Windows To Go to be installed on the device creating the recovery media. This meant for distributions of Windows where WinRE or Windows To Go is not available, it is not possible to create USB recovery media for Comet.
In Comet 24.8 Tethys, you will now be able to create a Linux based recovery environment. The process uses Docker to create a Debian based ISO with Comet pre-installed. This works well with our new Windows Disk Image backup restore capabilities from Linux announced above.
To create a Linux based recovery image, click "Create Recovery Media" on the Comet Backup desktop app. If the device also has Docker installed, you will see the new Linux ISO option becomes available.
Once the recovery image has been created, simply image it to a USB device. You will then be able to select it as a bootable device.
Once the recovery media has booted on the device, you will automatically be logged in and shown the pre-installed Comet Backup desktop app.
Sharing a Storage Vault is a fantastic way to reduce storage costs as Comet is able to deduplicate data across all devices that share a vault. This means, we only need to store one copy of the same file that exists on all devices. To ensure data is safe at all times, Comet uses Storage Vault locking to ensure one device doesn't remove essential data that another device was using.
If a PC shuts down unexpectedly such as if a laptop runs out of battery, Comet may leave a Storage Vault locked. This prevents other Comet devices that share the same vault from working, as when a Storage Vault is locked it means a device is running a data sensitive operation. One such operation is a retention pass.
Comet attempts to clean up Storage Vault locks, but this only happens when a new backup job runs. To improve how frequent backup jobs fail due to Storage Vaults being locked, Comet will now automatically remove vault locks when a devices wakes from sleep or when it boots.
This is a great improvement for our customers who have multiple devices sharing the same Storage Vault.
