We're proud to announce our partnership with cloud storage provider, Impossible Cloud. As a European-based company, this is a great option for IT Providers with GDPR compliance requirements. All data is securely stored within a European Cloud Provider in top-tier, GDPR-compliant, and ISO-certified data centers, eliminating the need for additional investment in data storage compliance.
Impossible Cloud is Europe’s premier cloud storage solution, designed to provide businesses with secure, scalable, and cost-effective data storage.
Their platform features built-in ransomware protection, unlimited hot storage, and 100% S3 API compatibility. Advanced security measures and significant cost savings makes Impossible Cloud an ideal choice for businesses looking to enhance their data storage capabilities.
Comet’s user-friendly integration with Impossible Cloud allows you to easily select Impossible Cloud as your storage solution.
The integration includes Storage Template support for provisioning direct-to-cloud buckets for individual end-users. This feature can use Impossible Cloud's IAM functionality for end-user support, as well as their partner API for MSPs who are looking to start reselling Impossible Cloud storage.
Another great feature we have with Impossible Cloud is Object Lock integration for creating immutable backups. Object Lock puts the data in an immutable state—it’s accessible and usable, but it can’t be changed or deleted. This provides complete defense against ransomware attacks, giving you peace of mind for data stored in the cloud.
Impossible Cloud IAM Storage Template with Object Lock
Another aspect that makes Impossible Cloud competitive for IT Providers is their price €7.99 per terabyte per month, with no egress or hidden fees. Impossible Cloud’s has a pay-for-what-you-use pricing structure which is designed to be transparent and predictable. This price is competitive with Wasabi, Backblaze and our own Comet Storage offering, with the benefit of allowing you to pay in Euros if you wish.
If you want to learn more about our integration partnership, join us for our joint webinar on Premier Cloud Storage & Backup for Europe’s MSPs on Wednesday, July 17th at 11am CET (Central European Time). If you can’t make it live, you can still register to get the recording sent to you after the webinar.
Last week we held our fourth CometCon event, a company-wide internal conference where both local and remote team members gather at Comet HQ for a week of collaboration, workshops, speaker talks, and connection.
As usual, our General Manager, Josh, kicked off the week with a fun team activity – this time splitting everyone into teams for an interactive quiz. After the winners were presented with their prizes, we launched into the conference sessions.
At each CometCon, every department is welcome to submit a topic for the speaker series. This week we had three technical deep dives from our developers, a website workshop with the Marketing team, customer insights from the Sales team, and a Q&A session focused on our European distributor market. It’s always valuable to learn from different departments and discuss how we can improve the product and experience for our customers.
During CometCon, our developers worked in pairs on a dedicated week-long sprint. It was great to partner the devs up with someone they don’t usually work with to generate fresh ideas and smash out specific projects.
In addition to the speaker series, we also had several open discussions about the product roadmap and our company direction, facilitated by Callum, our Product Engineering Manager, and Josh, our GM. Everyone was welcome to ask questions and contribute to the conversation in a town hall style discussion. It’s important to us to hear different perspectives and thoughts from all the teams on Comet’s journey.
One of the most valuable parts of CometCon is the unstructured time to connect and chat with everyone in person, especially for our fully remote team members. Even for those who work at Comet HQ – our company has a hybrid model where a couple days are remote each week – it is valuable to have everyone together for a full week. We find that the conversations and innovative ideas that get tabled over a shared plate of tacos or a pint at the pub, it something you just can’t replicate over Slack.
This was our best CometCon yet! The energy and buzz of having everyone together was amazing. Huge thanks to the event organizers for another successful CometCon! We can’t wait for the next one.
We're very pleased to announce our latest Quarterly release series - Comet 24.5 Enceladus. 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.
Enceladus is a moon of Saturn and is named after the giant Enceladus of Greek mythology. There are a few worlds that are thought to have liquid water oceans beneath their frozen shell, but Enceladus sprays its ocean out into space where spacecraft can sample it. From these samples, scientists have determined that Enceladus has most of the chemical ingredients needed for life, and likely has hydrothermal vents releasing hot, mineral-rich water into its ocean. Enceladus is about as wide as Arizona, and it also has the most reflective surface in our solar system. Because it reflects so much sunlight, the surface temperature is extremely cold, about minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 201 degrees Celsius).
For users coming from the previous 24.2 Mimas quarterly release series, Enceladus adds 6 new features and 38 enhancements. Some of the new features we are excited about are:
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 11 June (4pm EDT / 1pm PDT) to catch up on all the latest Comet news with Comet's CTO, Mason - and 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 YouTube channel, including guides on getting started with Comet, individual features, demonstrations with our technology partners, and webinars for previous quarterly software releases.
Microsoft Office 365 Protected Item Performance Improvements
Over this month, we have made significant improvements to the backup performance of our Microsoft Office 365 Protected Item. These performance improvements mean the backup job completes faster, as well as reduces the amount of data we need to upload. We expect partners to see Microsoft Office 365 Protected Items finish up to 30 times faster.
When configuring a Disk Image Protected Item in the Comet Server web interface, it can be difficult to configure when the device is not currently connected to the Comet Server. To help partners configure a Disk Image Protected Item more easily, we have added a new option to select disks to protect by drive letter.
Our Bulk Upgrade feature is a great way to keep Comet Backup desktop app installs up to date with the latest version that the Comet Server is running. However, for Comet Servers with many tenants using custom branding, a Bulk Upgrade campaign to upgrade older clients consumed significant CPU time building new client installers quickly.
In Comet 24.3.8 we added a new configuration option to limit the maximum number of CPU cores Comet can use during a Bulk Upgrade campaign. This is a fantastic improvement as it reduces the burden on system resources during a Comet Server upgrade. It also provides a more robust Bulk Upgrade campaign, as Comet Backup desktop app installs can be upgraded without overwhelming the Comet Server's resources. For more information, you can check out our documentation here.
Windows System Backup Protected Item - Deprecation Notice
Our Windows System Backup Protected Item is being deprecated. Before we added our Disk Image Protected Item, Windows System Backup Protected Item was a great way to backup and restore entire Windows disks. However, it required spool space (temporary storage) to be able to perform this backup. This means for a 500GB disk, Comet requires an additional 500GB of free space for this Protected Item to work.
Because of this limitation, and how difficult it is to setup, we have always recommended partners use our Disk Image Protected Item. To assist partners through this change, we have built a Windows System Backup to Disk Image conversion tool. For more information, you can see our documentation on the tool here.
We will be removing this Protected Item in November (Comet Release 24.11).
We're pleased to announce the Syncro integration with Comet is now available. This has been a popular feature request and we are pleased that partners can now monitor their backups through Syncro's RMM platform.
Syncro - Helps you scale your MSP buisness with efficiency and ease.
Transform how you manage customers and your business with RMM, PSA and remote access in a single platform. The streamlined workflow allows you to focus your time and energy on what you're an expert in – providing solutions for your clients.
With the Syncro integration, you can access RMM alerts in Syncro's platform when a Comet backup job fails or doesn’t run. This allows you to see your alerts in one place, rather than logging into Comet, and troubleshoot before you lose any business critical data.
If you are interested in configuring this integration, you can read our guide here.
When a backup job fails, a new RMM alerts will be created. You can see this on the Open RMM Alerts page in Syncro. An example of how this will look is:
If the failure is due to an intermittent issue, Comet will clear the alert when the backup job succeeds again.
This means you no longer have to login to your Comet Server to check if backup jobs are running successfully or not.
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 over April 2024.
There were three Comet releases during April - two in the Voyager release series, plus one update for our Mimas release series.
We've landed a few large and exciting features this April:
Hyper-V CBT is now available in our Voyager series. 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 Comet only needs to upload the data that has changed inside the VM without having to read and upload every byte.
You will find two new Hyper-V Backup Mode types when setting up a Hyper-V Protected Item. These are Latest VM State (Changed Block Tracking) and Latest VM State (Standard). You can read more about what these new modes do in our documentation here
Under the hood our two new Hyper-V Backup Mode types use WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and RCT (Windows Resilient Change Tracking) to perform the backup. This is a completely new way for Comet to backup Hyper-V VMs as our old implementation used Windows VSS (Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service).
New Hyper-V Backup Option One: Changed Block Tracking using WMI and RCT
New Hyper-V Backup Option One: Hyper-V Backup using WMI
We're pleased to announce that Impossible Cloud is now available as a built-in Storage Template in our Voyager series. If you enter top-level credentials into the Storage Template, Comet can use them to provision private buckets with separate credentials for each user, allowing seamless direct-to-cloud backup.
As a quick reminder - when using the Storage Templates, it's likely you'll want to configure cleanup for cloud buckets that are no longer being used by any user account. Comet's solution for this problem is called Constellation Role, and it's available from the settings page of your Comet Server. In Constellation, you can enter the same credentials for it to search through. When a Constellation report runs, it finds all your buckets; checks all the user accounts; cross-references the users' Storage Vaults with the available buckets; and deletes any discovered buckets that are not in use by any user account.
Constellation Role is designed to scale up to clusters of multiple Comet Servers, with any mix of server replication, Storage Role, or direct-to-cloud buckets created by the Storage Template feature. You should have exactly one Constellation Role server amongst your entire cluster of Comet Servers.
Users can now sign into Comet-Hosted servers using their account.cometbackup.com accounts. This feature simplifies access to Comet-Hosted servers, allowing users to utilize their existing Comet Backup account credentials for authentication. To enhance security, users are encouraged to set up two-factor authentication (2FA) on account.cometbackup.com.
This feature has already been enabled, and will be used the next time you click the login button from the My Services page on account.cometbackup.com.
In addition, once you have clicked the login button on the My Services page you will notice the new "Login with Comet Account Portal" button appear on the login screen of your Comet-Hosted server. This button will only appear on browsers where you have clicked the My Services login button before. We have done this to ensure we don't break any rebranding you have configured by showing a big "Login with Comet Account Portal" button.
We are pleased to announce that Comet-Hosted is now available to be hosted in the London region. Comet users now have the choice of four geographically diverse locations to choose from when selecting where their Comet-Hosted server should be located.
Throughout April, we rolled out over twenty fixes and enhancements aimed at improving the overall quality and performance of Comet. These updates underline our commitment to providing a reliable and efficient backup solution for our users.
We announced a change to our Self-Hosted licensing this week, and I’d like to take some time to provide more context. We have received feedback, both positive and negative, with many constructive insights – thank you to those that have been in touch.
Since launching in 2017, Self-Hosted has evolved into our enterprise solution which allows you access to features such as:
Setting up tenant accounts
Multi-server replication
Support for on-prem storage
Access to our full API
Scalable solution for resellers and distributors
Comet-Hosted does not support these features, which is why its price remains $49/server/month. Please check out our product pages for Self-Hosted and Comet-Hosted for a full comparison.
We’re committed to helping MSPs provide great backup services. In order to fulfil that mission and to grow the product, we need to adequately support and resource our development team. As our business grows to meet your needs, our pricing model needed to change.
Increasingly, we’re finding that more end-users are skipping their MSP and are buying Comet directly. We have always supported a Channel-first approach. We stand behind the value that we know MSPs offer their clients. It’s important to us to honor that commitment and drive business to our MSP partners.
With our previous pricing model, we were seeing a disproportionate number of signups choosing Self-Hosted, based solely on price. They spent a lot of time setting it up, and we spent a lot of time helping them configure a product that didn’t necessarily suit their use case. The purpose of this price realignment is to match customers with the product that best fits their needs based on feature set rather than a default price.
We understand that for some of our partners this is a big change. We are here to help you navigate this transition and figure out what is right for your business. Whether you want to stay with Self-Hosted, migrate to Comet-Hosted, or work with one of our trusted resellers or distributors, we are here to help you. Feel free to reach out to us at hello@cometbackup.com to discuss your options.
Thank you,
Josh
Josh Flores
General Manager
Comet Backup
We’ve had some questions, and I’d like to address a few of these here:
Q. Have there been any external influences on this decision?
A. No, we’re a privately owned company. Our only influence has been to reflect the true value of Comet’s Self-Hosted enterprise-level features and benefits as well as the time and effort of our excellent support and onboarding team.
Q. Could you have verified / confirmed MSPs and businesses before they could access Self-Hosted?
A. We have heard it loud and clear that having to book a sales call to access a product isn’t well liked. This is why you can start a free trial with Comet at any time.
Q. Are you wanting to migrate users to Comet-Hosted to then put up the price there?
A. We have no plans to change the price for Comet-Hosted.
Q. Could you have just charged users for support?
A. This has the effect of discouraging people from reaching out to us. We’re here to help, and we want our partners to succeed. Our support remains free.
Q. Are any other areas of Comet’s pricing affected?
A. No, this pricing change only affects Self-Hosted Server licensing.
We sat down for a chat with Callum Sinclair, our Product Engineering Manager who has been with the company since January 2023. This piece has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I started at Comet as the Development Team Leader, and was promoted into the Product Engineering Manager role earlier this year.
As the Dev Team Leader, I was looking after the entire development department; scoping and managing work for both dev teams, and promoting a culture of quality and growth so that our team is constantly upskilling to better serve our customers’ needs.
Now my role as Product Engineering Manager has grown to also include setting the direction that Comet takes as a product and laying out our product roadmap.
It changes every week depending on what we’ve got going on. That’s what keeps the job exciting.
A lot of it is communicating with internal and external stakeholders about what we're planning to do. One of the most important parts of my role is speaking directly with our customers, distributors and integration partners to hear their needs and figure out how we can address them.
Then I gather all that information into a cohesive vision and work with the development team to scope and action upcoming work.
I was looking to take the next step in my career and Comet provided me the opportunity to go from a senior software engineer into a leadership role, which was the opportunity I was looking for. It's been awesome.
What is your favorite thing about working at Comet?
The freedom and autonomy to have an impact and make changes that elevate the team and the way we do things. There isn’t a culture of, “you must do it this way”.
The opportunity to grow is incredible. Sometimes that involves mistakes or missteps, but I’ve learned a lot, and continue to improve. I think that is reflected in the product we make. We're always pushing ourselves to be better, which results in a product that’s constantly improving.
It’s awesome – everyone supports each other, which is amazing. You can always speak up, ask questions and ask for help. Everyone's here to support each other. One of the strongest things we have at Comet is how well we work with each other.
It’s a very open culture, so you always feel included, you’re never shut out of decisions and you’re always kept in the loop. We encourage everyone to give input, even if it’s not their department or their project. Anyone can voice an opinion or raise an issue. Which makes for a great work environment.
What is the learning and development like at Comet?
You are learning all the time. I don't think there's ever been a day where I haven't been like, "Oh, that's new." Or, "That's something cool."
We're constantly picking up new tech and have the opportunity to work on new things.
That is also reflected in our development work. You're always getting pushed into new areas, you get to work on your code bases, new products, new features. We also push people to do additional training in areas that we think will be of value to them in the future. So there's plenty of chances to grow and to learn.
What keeps you passionate about moving forward in the industry?
I’m passionate about building a high quality backup product that fits the needs of organizations across many different industries. I’m excited that we have the opportunity to be innovative and refine our ideas.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into the tech industry?
There’s a lot of ways to get into the industry, and I think it really just starts with being passionate in anything related to tech.
You can go the traditional ways through university or higher education taking courses like computer science or software engineering. That gives you great exposure to the different fields and domains within the tech industry.
Another way is just getting involved and writing your own code. I think it comes down to what you’re passionate about and following what interests you.
My earliest memory of tech is probably playing Age of Empires II on an old school Windows XP, that got me interest in computers in general.
From there I started doing programming courses in high school and in college, which led to being interested in studying computer science. The more I learned, the more interested I got because there is so much to learn and tech is evolving so quickly. There’s so many areas you can get into.
If you could have any tech superpower, what would it be?
The first that came to mind would be the ability to instantly write code in different languages. I know about four coding languages at this point and I'd love to learn more, but don't have the time. Being able to natively pick it up and jump in between code bases would be awesome.
Also, being able to spot code issues would be another one. But then again some of the fun of coding is spending the hours to find the bug, finally understanding it, and then fixing it. So having that superpower might be cheating the process a little bit.
I like biking as my mode of transport, so it’s fantastic that it’s flat in Christchurch. It’s also really convenient to get to most outdoor activities. Christchurch is close to the mountains and also has nice beaches nearby. Being on the South Island, we have easy access to do weekend trips to amazing destinations like Wanaka and Queenstown.
I used to swim competitively, and I still spend some time training in the pool. I’m also a big fan of F1 racing now. Another hobby is trying out new foods, cooking different cuisines, and trying the adventurous options at restaurants.
We know everyone at Comet loves food. What are your top three restaurants in Christchurch?
At the moment, I'm a big fan of the barbecue restaurants. There’s Beers down the road from the office, and an all you can eat Brazilian BBQ place in Papanui. And I like El Quincho, the Argentinian BBQ place at Riverside Market.
Last month we premiered our inaugural Research & Development Week. Previous to this, developers worked on independent projects during Comet’s quarterly Hackathon. We changed up the format in Q1 to instead have a consolidated focus on high impact initiatives. Our developers split into three teams to collaborate on improving your user experience.
The three projects were scoped and designed by our CTO and Product Engineering Manager. Each team presented initial ideas, proof of concept, findings, and next steps. We utilized this collaborative, team-based approach to mix developers with differing specialties, who don’t normally work together, for synergistic problem-solving sessions to improve the software.
The three topics were:
Can we make an awesome experience restoring data from the Comet Server web interface?
Can we upgrade how Comet uses memory when running backup / restore jobs?
Can we improve how we backup / restore data to and from S3 storage vaults?
R&D week was a great success. We made great progress in all three areas. Some of the research and development work is making its way to become production ready code, and others need a bit more time to become features for Comet customers.
It was rewarding to challenge our team in areas outside their traditional expertise and get some wins on the board over the course of a few days to improve Comet.
"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 March 2024.
There were six Comet releases during March - four in the Voyager release series, plus two updates for our Mimas release series.
We've landed a few large and exciting features this March:
New Protected Item Wizard for the Comet Backup Desktop App
We have overhauled our Protected Item Wizard for the Comet Backup desktop app. As part of this refresh we have moved the section where you name your Protected Item to the end, along with a nice summary of what you have configured to back up.
Each step of the Protected Item Wizard has had new styles applied to it, and below are some of the major differences you will see in new versions of the Comet Backup desktop app.
We have significantly improved the performance of browsing files and folders during a granular restore from Disk Image, Hyper-V, or VMware Protected Items. These improvements have significantly improved the responsiveness of the file browser when selecting files and folders to restore, particularly on slow or high-latency connections. Prior to 24.3.2, the file browser would have to wait for data to be retrieved from the Storage Vault every time a disk or folder was expanded, which could cause multiple second loads on slower connections. In 24.3.2 and newer, Comet has to retrieve new data much less frequently, significantly reducing the time spent waiting for folder contents to load.
We have added a new Storage Vault type to make use of network file shares using the SMB protocol. This is a fantastic addition to our Storage Vault offerings, as you can now backup to and restore from network file shares inside your infrastructure that use the SMB protocol.
If you are looking to back up data to your local NAS, check out our new SMB Storage Vault offering.
New Restore Option: Overwrite only if files are different
When restoring data with Comet, you will find a new restore option "If the restored file is different". When this option is set, Comet will only restore the file to the location if the file contents are not the same. If the same file already exists in the restore location, Comet will not need to do anything.
This is also useful for times when you want to quickly revert the contents of a folder to a previous snapshot, as Comet will only need to download and restore what changed between the two points in time.
Prevent Admin Accounts from Deleting Storage Vaults
Admin policies and permissions continue to be improved and expanded in our latest releases. You can now lock down admin accounts from being able to delete users storage vaults. This adds an additional layer of security and protection to your Comet accounts.
You can find these settings when editing an admin account on the Comet Server web interface.
The macOS Console app provides crash reports and live log messages of the running processes on your Mac. We have added support for the Comet Backup desktop app to write log message to the Console app. This is a huge improvement to being able to audit what is happening with Comet Backup on macOS, as well as making it easier to troubleshoot issues when they occur.
Having a Server Self-Backup provides peace of mind that you can recover a Comet Server from a number of disastrous situations. This includes being able to restore a Comet Server in the event critical settings are changed causing outages within your Comet environment.
For new installations of a Comet Server, the Server Self-Backup feature is now enabled by default. Comet strongly recommends moving the backup from the default location (the server installation directory) to somewhere safer, preferably offsite so you can recover from disaster situations.
If you haven't configured Server Self-Backup on your Comet Server yet, you can find the steps to set this up in our documentation
Comet Server supports backing up data to many different storage locations. Comet Server system administrators can configure storage in the client's settings; or server-side with Storage Role; or for supported storage providers, you can configure the Storage Templates feature to provision private, direct-to-cloud credentials for customer backup storage. This provides ease of use and high performance - as long as the storage provider has a compatible integration with Comet Server.
For the long-tail of other providers, we support Custom Remote Bucket and Custom IAM-Compatible as extension points to integrate with the Storage Templates feature. During March, in Comet 24.3.3, we improved the Custom IAM-Compatible Storage Template feature to support many new capabilities, including Object Lock support; the option to create buckets in custom S3 regions; and the option to choose whether the provisioning action creates individual buckets or private subdirectories.
These three new enhancements extend Comet Server's IAM compatibility, and ensure that you can use the Custom IAM-Compatible Storage Template feature with more of the IAM-compatible storage providers on the market.
World Backup Day serves as a timely reminder to review your backup strategies and to educate your end users and partners on the importance of data backup.
While World Backup Day is observed annually on March 31st, MSPs and IT providers play a critical role in protecting businesses and organisations every day of the year.
World Backup Day was created in 2011 and started with a post on Reddit where a user wrote about losing their hard drive and wished someone had reminded them about how important it is to backup data. World Backup Day highlights the importance of securing and protecting data.
In today’s digital age, data backup and data protection is critical for businesses and organisation to help protect against:
Ransomware
Cybersecurity attacks
Human error
Data loss
Hardware malfunction
Power failure
Natural disasters
Having a robust backup solution and solid restore process will help safeguard against these threats and help minimize downtime for your end users and clients.
A secure and reliable backup platform is essential to MSPs & IT Providers’ backup and disaster recovery (BDR) strategy to maintain business continuity in the event of a security incident.
Here are some of the core features & benefits of Comet Backup:
Easy to use: Comet Backup has an intuitive, easy-to-use web console where you can remotely manage and protect devices. Comet is fast and easy to set up – start running backups and restores in less than 15 minutes.
Flexible: Choose Comet Storage powered by Wasabi for an all-in-one storage solution, or utilize your own storage, whether that’s an on-prem solution or a S3 compatible storage provider (including AWS, Backblaze, Wasabi, Azure, and more). You’re in control of where your data sits.
Fast, efficient chunking technology: Advanced backup algorithm packages data into small blocks for faster uploads and downloads, saving valuable time.
Reliable, Safe & Secure: Data is encrypted during backup, transit, and rest. Comet is also HIPPA and GDPR compliant.
Client-side deduplication: Reduces redundant data, ensuring more efficient storage usage and therefore cost savings.
Incremental forever without full re-uploads: After the initial backup, only changes are uploaded, conserving bandwidth, and accelerating the backup process.
Compression and encryption: Client data is compact for storage efficiency and secured against breaches, ensuring peace of mind.
World Backup Day is a great time to educate and remind your end users and partners of the importance of data backup. Your goal as IT Providers and MSPs is to provide the best support and solutions to give your partners peace of mind and confidence that their businesses’ data is safe and protected.
