May is Mental Health Month, which makes it the perfect time to talk about something that often gets pushed to the bottom of the priority list in IT and managed services.

The humans behind the keyboards.

At Comet Backup, we spend a lot of time thinking about protection, resilience, and recovery. Turns out those ideas apply to people too.

We have built small wellness habits into our week, like sharing quick tips during our Friday all-hands and keeping a Slack channel full of everything from healthy recipes to reminders to log off and go outside once in a while. Nothing revolutionary. Just simple ways to keep the conversation about workplace wellbeing going.

So what is Mental Health Awareness really?​

It is not just posters and corporate emails telling everyone to “prioritize wellbeing.”

It is about recognizing that mental health matters just as much as physical health. It is also about making it normal to say:

• “I’m overloaded today.”
• “Can someone give me a hand with this?”
• “I need a break, I’ve been staring at the screen for too long.”

Mental health conversations are important because burnout rarely appears overnight. It builds slowly through stress, pressure, and constantly running at full capacity without enough time to recover.

And in IT, that can happen faster than most people realize.

Why burnout hits MSPs and IT teams particularly hard​

Let’s be honest, this industry can be intense.

If you work in IT or managed services, some of these probably sound familiar:

• Always on-call because systems do not care what time it is
• Constant firefighting where solving one issue reveals three more
• Client pressure and urgent requests landing at the same time
• Remote work or solo roles that can feel isolating
• The endless sea of tickets in the queue

It is rewarding work, but it can also quietly wear people down over time.

Burnout in MSP and IT environments often looks like:

• Feeling mentally exhausted before the day even starts
• Struggling to switch off after work
• Losing patience faster than usual
• Making simple mistakes from fatigue
• Feeling like every alert triggers instant stress

That is why protecting mental health at work is not just a “nice to have.” It directly affects team wellbeing, performance, and long-term sustainability.

5 realistic ways MSPs can reduce stress and avoid burnout​

No vague “just relax more” advice here. These are practical habits that actually help in busy IT environments.

1. Set boundaries between “online” and “always available”
One of the fastest paths to burnout is feeling like you can never fully disconnect.

Not every issue is a 2am emergency. Define after-hours expectations clearly with both clients and your team. Protecting your personal time is important.

2. Take small breaks before your brain forces you to
Micro-breaks matter more than people think. Even short pauses help reduce stress and reset focus.

Use a timer, like Pomodoro or breaktimer.app, to remind yourself to stretch, hydrate or get a cup of tea, or take a few minutes to look away from the screen (all screens, including the small screen).

3. Automate repetitive work wherever possible
Doing the same manual tasks every day drains mental energy fast.

If something keeps repeating, automate it, document it, or simplify it. Reducing repetitive workload helps lower cognitive overload and gives your team more breathing room.

4. Check in with humans, not just tickets
Make it normal to check in and have a friendly chat with coworkers—not just about tickets or projects, but about how they’re doing.

A culture of openness leads to earlier support and less stigma.

5. Move Your Body
It is easy for conversations in IT teams to become entirely task-focused.

• “Any updates?”
• “What is the ETA?”
• Did the backup complete?”

Sometimes a simple “How are you going?” matters more.

Open conversations help reduce isolation and make it easier for people to speak up before stress becomes burnout.

A few helpful resources​

If you want to learn more about workplace wellbeing, stress management, or burnout prevention, these are worth bookmarking:

• Channel Pro Network – How Can An MSP Manage Workloads To Prevent Employee Burnout?
• Headspace – Managing Workplace Stress and Burnout
• Calm - Best Mental Health Apps for Workplace Well-Being

Comet 26.4.0 Phoebe​

Comet 26.4.0 Phoebe, our latest Quarterly release, brings new features that expand how you can access and manage Comet Backup. Highlights include a native cPanel plugin for seamless hosting-panel integration, Proxmox guest quotas for better resource control, and Storage Template replication across management consoles for simplified multi-server environments. This release also adds Czech language support, updates to our Ukrainian translation, and an important fix for a Microsoft 365 Graph API issue that affected backup providers industry-wide.

The full set of changes can be found in the release notes.

Why Phoebe?​

This Quarterly release is named after Saturn's moon Phoebe.

Fun fact: Phoebe is one of Saturn's most unusual moons. It orbits in the opposite direction (retrograde) to nearly all of Saturn's other moons, which strongly suggests it was captured from the Kuiper Belt rather than forming alongside Saturn. Its surface is exceptionally dark, reflecting only about 6% of the sunlight that hits it, making it one of the darkest objects in the Solar System. NASA's Cassini spacecraft flew by Phoebe in 2004, revealing a heavily cratered, ancient world rich in ice and carbon, a relic from the earliest days of our solar system.

Webinar Announcement​

Join us for our Quarterly webinar on Tuesday, May 13th, 2026 (4pm ET / 1pm PT). Comet Backup's Product Manager, Adam Wien, and Engineering Manager, Callum Sinclair, will cover all the latest product updates, with a live question-and-answer session at the end.

Register for the webinar here.

New Feature: cPanel Plugin​

Comet Backup is now available as a native cPanel plugin, bringing enterprise-grade backup directly into the world's most popular hosting control panel.

For WHM administrators, this means you can set up, schedule, and manage per-account backups entirely within WHM — no external tools or separate management consoles required. The plugin handles everything from activation and storage provisioning to backup scheduling and per-account restores, all from the interface you already use every day.

Key benefits:​

• Fully integrated in WHM — Create and manage backup jobs, configure schedules, and restore accounts directly from the WHM Plugins section, with no external software or dashboards to manage

• Per-account backups and restores — Back up and restore individual cPanel accounts including files, databases, email, and account settings, designed for multi-tenant hosting environments

• Incremental and deduplicated — Backups are incremental with server-wide deduplication, minimizing storage usage and keeping backup windows short

• Flexible scheduling and retention — Configure backup schedules and retention policies that fit your hosting business, from daily account backups to on-demand runs

Whether you're a shared hosting provider looking to offer reliable backup protection or a server administrator who needs real disaster-recovery capability for cPanel accounts, the Comet Backup cPanel plugin delivers a complete, integrated solution. If you're already a cPanel partner, reach out to your account manager to get started.

New Feature: Proxmox Guest Quotas​

Comet 26.4.0 Phoebe introduces guest quotas for Proxmox environments, giving partners fine-grained control over the number of virtual machines and containers that can be backed up per user.

This feature is especially valuable for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who need to manage backup costs and set clear boundaries for their customers' Proxmox environments.

How it works:​

• Set a maximum number of Proxmox guests (VMs and containers) that a user is allowed to back up
• The quota is configured per user in the Comet Management Console
• If a user attempts to back up more guests than their quota allows, the backup job will return a clear error message, preventing unexpected usage growth

Why it matters:​

• Cost control for MSPs — Align backup capacity with your service tiers and pricing plans
• Predictable resource usage — Prevent any single customer from consuming more Proxmox backup capacity than allocated
• Clear customer communication — Transparent quota limits that customers can see and understand

New Feature: Storage Template Replication​

Storage Templates can now be replicated as part of the Management Console replication feature. For organizations running multiple Comet management consoles, whether for redundancy, geographic distribution, or organizational separation, this means your storage configurations stay consistent across all consoles automatically.

Previously, storage templates had to be configured independently on each management console. With 26.4.0 Phoebe, when you configure replication between management consoles, your storage templates are included automatically. Any changes made to storage templates on one console will be replicated to the others.

Benefits:​

• Reduced configuration overhead — Set up storage templates once and have them automatically available across all your management consoles
• Consistency — Ensure all your consoles offer the same storage options to users, eliminating configuration drift
• Simplified disaster recovery — If a management console needs to be rebuilt, storage templates are restored automatically as part of the replication

New Language Support​

Czech Language Translation​

Comet Backup now features a Czech (Čeština) language translation, contributed by the community through our open-source translations repository on GitHub. This brings Comet's total to 17 supported languages, making it easier for Czech-speaking partners and end users to manage their backups in their native language.

Updated Ukrainian Translation​

We've also updated our Ukrainian (Українська мова) translation with improved accuracy and coverage, which was initially introduced in Comet 26.1.0 Iapetus.

We welcome contributions from the community to help bring Comet Backup to more languages. Visit our translations repository on GitHub to contribute.

Enhancements​

Comet 26.4.0 Phoebe includes numerous enhancements across the platform. These improvements increase reliability, streamline daily operations, and address community feedback. A full list of enhancements and bug fixes can be found in our release notes.

Management Console:​

• Automatic redirect to new job's report page when triggered through the web UI
• Allow easily selecting groups of snapshots to search for restore or to delete
• Added a lock/unlock button to password and bucket ID fields to prevent password manager autofill
• Added custom general-purpose metadata fields to the User Profile for use via the API

Proxmox:​

• Detect user inadvertently entering the Proxmox Web UI port number (8006) for the SSH port
• Fixed issues with Proxmox restore to Ceph/RBD storage
• Fixed issues with Proxmox storage names containing upper-case letters

Security & Reliability:​

• Added warning message if configuring a webhook integration over insecure HTTP
• Added internal mongodump functionality, removing dependency on external executables
• Fixed an issue where Comet Core would fail to start if the Storage Gateway failed to validate storage buckets
• Improved handling of symlinks during restore on Linux

Backup Agent:​

• Improved MySQL backup performance with optimized dump flags
• Fixed login dialog refresh issues in the Comet Backup desktop app
• Improved Linux Recovery Media with automatic internet time sync
• Fixed Recovery Media generation from Podman Desktop-based Docker environments

Addressing the Microsoft 365 Graph API Issue​

Earlier this month, an upstream bug in Microsoft's Graph API caused Calendar Events delta queries to enter an infinite loop, returning unbounded data to any application requesting calendar sync updates. This was an industry-wide issue that affected backup providers across the board — not specific to Comet.

The impact for Comet customers was that some Microsoft 365 backup jobs became stuck or failed due to excessive memory consumption as the backup agent tried to process the never-ending API response.

Our engineering team identified the root cause, traced it back to Microsoft's API behavior, and built a fix into Comet 26.4.0 Phoebe. The fix introduces safeguards that detect when a Graph API delta query returns an abnormally large or unbounded dataset. Rather than consuming memory indefinitely, Comet now identifies this condition, terminates the runaway request, and falls back to a safe recovery path — allowing backup jobs to complete successfully without manual intervention.

We also proactively communicated with all affected MS365 customers as soon as the issue was understood, so partners could set expectations with their own clients.

Even though this was a Microsoft-side bug, we believe Comet should be resilient to unexpected behavior from third-party APIs. This fix makes Comet more robust against similar upstream issues in the future, and we'll continue to invest in defensive engineering to protect your backups. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at hello@cometbackup.com.

It’s that time of year again, our favorite cybersecurity holiday: World Backup Day! Celebrated every March 31st, this day recognizes the essential work of backing up and protecting data.

World Backup Day started back in 2011 with a Reddit post from someone who lost their hard drive and wished they'd been reminded about backups sooner. The timing is perfect too. Landing right before April Fool's Day, it's the universe's way of saying: don’t be a fool – protect your data.

What World Backup Day Means for the Everyday IT Heroes​

If you're an MSP or IT professional, World Backup Day is a good reminder to review your backup strategies, share your expertise with clients, and remind everyone why that robust backup solution you implemented was the right call all along. Data protection doesn’t just happen on World Backup Day, it happens every single day.

Why is Data Backup Important?​

Strong backup and data protection strategies are what keep businesses running when everything else fails. You're defending organizations against:

• Data loss and accidental deletion
• Ransomware attacks
• Cybersecurity breaches
• Hardware failures
• System crashes
• Natural disasters
• Human error (coffee spilling on laptops included)

With a solid backup solution and tested recovery processes, you're equipped to handle whatever comes next. You're not just preventing disasters. You're the reason your clients and end users can focus on growing their business instead of worrying about “what if something happens?”

Staying Ahead: 2026 Backup Trends​

The backup landscape is evolving, and as an IT professional, you're right at the forefront. Here's what's defining resilient backup strategies in 2026:

Immutable and air-gapped backups: Immutable backups prevent any alterations or deletions during set retention periods, while air-gapping isolates backup data from network access. Together, they create an unbreachable defense against ransomware targeting backup repositories.

Recovery validation over features: Customers care whether their business can recover fast when something goes wrong. The winning approach combines recurring restore testing, documented workflows, and clear backup reporting. It's not about having the fanciest tools. It's about proving you can actually restore when it matters.

Cyber resilience as core infrastructure: Backup and disaster recovery teams play a key role in ensuring cyber resilience as the last line of defense. Your backup strategy is no longer just IT infrastructure, it's critical for business continuity.

Your World Backup Day Checklist for MSPs and IT Teams​

Use March 31st as a reminder to run through the fundamentals:

• Review backup coverage across all environments, including servers, databases, email systems, endpoints, and virtual machines
• Confirm you have layered backups in multiple locations, not a single point of failure
• Validate retention policies against current compliance and client requirements
• Test restores regularly and document recovery time performance
• Verify backup job success with automated reports and alerts
• Lock down access to backup repositories with strong authentication and least privilege controls

Why MSPs and IT Providers Choose Comet Backup​

When you're in the business of protecting data, you need tools that work as hard as you do. A reliable backup platform isn't optional for a strong BDR strategy. It's what lets you confidently tell clients they're covered, and actually mean it.   Here's what makes Comet Backup the right tool for IT heroes:

• 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.

• Versatile storage options: Choose between integrated cloud storage or utilize your own storage, whether that’s an on-prem solution or a S3 compatible storage provider (including AWS, Azure, Wasabi, Backblaze B2 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 and Secure: End-to-end encryption during backup, transit, and at rest.

• Client-side deduplication: Reduces redundant data, ensuring more efficient storage usage and 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.

Protect your data this World Backup Day​

World Backup Day is a great time to educate and remind your end users and clients   how you keep businesses protected and operational. As an MSP or IT provider, you're not just implementing backup solutions. You're delivering confidence, enabling growth, and making sure that when the unexpected happens, your clients and end users are ready for it.

Ready to see what Comet Backup can do for your backup strategy? Test drive Comet Backup with a 30-day FREE trial, or book a discovery call with our team to learn more about how Comet Backup can help your business.

More 2026 IT Holidays and Cybersecurity Awareness Days​

Check out our blog post on 2026 IT 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.

Proxmox VE Backup Is Now Available​

We're excited to announce that support for backing up Proxmox VE is now available in Comet 26.1.0 or later.

Whether you're already running Proxmox or exploring alternatives to VMware and Hyper-V, our Proxmox Protected Item will give you more options to protect VMs and virtual environments.

Learn More & Resources:​

• Watch our 2026 Q1 Quarterly Release webinar replay to see our Proxmox Backup launch, with live Q&A at the end

• Explore our Proxmox Backup solution page to learn more about the Protected Item, key features, and FAQs

• Visit our Proxmox VE documentation page to find out more about requirements, backups, restores, and more

• Pricing for Proxmox VE Backup will be:

  • $3 per VM (max. $24 per host)
  • $1 per container (max. $8 per host)

• Visit our Feature Voting page to see how your ideas and votes shape our development priorities

Proxmox Virtual Environment​

Proxmox Virtual Environment is a complete, open-source server management platform for enterprise virtualization. It tightly integrates the KVM hypervisor and Linux Containers (LXC), software-defined storage and networking functionality, on a single platform. With the integrated web-based user interface you can manage VMs and containers, high availability for clusters, or the integrated disaster recovery tools with ease.

Many businesses turn to open-source virtualization to streamline their IT operations through server consolidation. Proxmox VE offers a license-free, fully featured virtualization platform that enhances flexibility, security, and reliability, making it a smart choice for modern infrastructure.

If you are looking to use Proxmox VE, you can find their comparison against VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V here.

Features of Comet's Proxmox VE Backup​

Virtual Machine and Container Backup & Restore​

Our new Proxmox VE Protected Item will support backing up and restoring Virtual Machines (VM's) and Linux Containers to and from a Proxmox Cluster.

Backing up VMs will also launch with Changed Block Tracking (CBT) support for fast backups as Comet only needs to back up disk sectors that have changed instead of scanning the entire disk to find what has changed since the last backup.

Restore Virtual Machines to Hyper-V, Proxmox and VMware​

Our new Proxmox VE Protected Item adds support for restoring VMs directly into a Proxmox Cluster. Once Comet's Proxmox VE Protected Item is launched customers will be able to restore a VM to Hyper-V, Proxmox or VMware hypervisors regardless of which hypervisor the backup was taken from.

Restore Physical Machines from Disk Image Protected Items​

Our new Proxmox VE Protected Item adds support for restoring physical Disk Image backups directly to a Proxmox Cluster. This is a great feature for customers needing to restore a Disk Image backup instantly without needing to acquire physical hardware to perform the restore on.

Migration Tool from Hyper-V and VMware​

Our new Proxmox VE Protected Item can be used to migrate VMs away from Hyper-V or VMware onto a Proxmox Cluster. There are quite a few benefits for using Comet to migrate your Hyper-V or VMware VMs.

If you have an existing Hyper-V or VMware Protected Item backup, you can migrate to Proxmox quickly without losing your backup history. This allows you to restore an older VM backup if required without needing to use any other systems or manage multiple backup jobs per VM.

Once Comet has performed a Hyper-V or VMware VM backup, if you set the Proxmox Protected Item to back up the same VM to the same Storage Vault as the Hyper-V or VMware Protected Item Comet's chunking algorithm will be able to deduplicate the backups together. This has a large number of benefits such as reducing total Storage required to maintain VM backups from multiple hypervisors and significantly faster backups as the first Proxmox VM backup does not need to re-upload a lot of data.

Comet's Proxmox VE Backup - Full Feature List & Capabilities​

Backup & Restore Capabilities:​

• Virtual Machine and Container Backup & Restore
• Backup of stopped VMs (automatically suspended during backup)
• Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for faster incremental backups
• Support for all disk types including TPM State drives
• Non-root user support for enhanced security
• Proxmox v8 and v9 compatibility
• Multi-node Proxmox cluster support

Restore Options:​

• Restore Virtual Machines to Proxmox VE
• Restore Virtual Machines from Hyper-V
• Restore Virtual Machines from VMware
• Restore to various storage backends (Local, Ceph/RBD, Network storage)
• Granular file-level restore from VM backups

Storage Backend Support:​

Supported File-Level Storage:​

• Directory (dir) - Local file storage
• BTRFS (btrfs) - Technology preview, supports snapshots
• NFS (nfs) - Shared network storage
• CIFS (cifs) - SMB/Windows network storage

Supported Block-Level Storage:​

• LVM (lvm) - Local block storage, can be used over iSCSI/FC
• LVM-thin (lvmthin) - Thin provisioned LVM with snapshots
• Ceph/RBD (rbd) - Distributed block storage with snapshots

Supported ZFS-Based Storage:​

• ZFS local (zfspool) - ZFS volumes with snapshot support
• ZFS over iSCSI (zfs) - Shared ZFS block storage

Comet 26.1.0 Iapetus​

Comet 26.1.0 Iapetus, our latest Quarterly release, brings 9 new features and 7 enhancements, and marks an important milestone as our Proxmox VE Protected Item graduates from Beta to General Availability. This release also includes numerous enhancements to performance, reliability, and platform support.

The full set of changes can be found in the release notes.

Why Iapetus?​

This Quarterly release is named after Saturn's moon Iapetus.

Fun fact: Iapetus, Saturn's third-largest moon, is the only large moon in the Solar System with a two-tone coloration - one hemisphere bright as snow and the other dark as coal. This dramatic contrast makes it the most distinctive moon orbiting Saturn, with one side ten times brighter than the other, giving it a striking yin-yang appearance from space.

Webinar Announcement​

Join us for our Quarterly webinar on Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 (3pm ET / 12pm PT). Comet Backup's Mason Giles, Architect, and Adam Wein, Product Manager, will cover all the latest product updates, with a live question-and-answer session at the end.

Register for the webinar here.

New Feature: Proxmox Virtual Environment Protected Item General Access​

With Comet 26.1.0 Iapetus, our Proxmox VE Protected Item has graduated from Beta to General Availability and is production-ready.

Proxmox Virtual Environment is a complete, open-source server management platform for virtualization. It tightly integrates the KVM hypervisor, Linux Containers (LXC), software-defined storage, and networking functionality on a single platform. With the integrated web-based user interface you can manage VMs, containers and high availability for clusters.

Setting up the Proxmox VE Protected Item is very simple and follows the same UX patterns as other Protected Items.

Highlights of Comet's Proxmox VE Backup​

• Virtual Machine and Container Backup & Restore
• Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for Proxmox Protected Items
• Restore Virtual Machines to Hyper-V, Proxmox and VMware

Virtual Machine and Container Backup & Restore​

The setup is simple. Install the Comet Backup agent on the Proxmox Host, associate it with your Comet Backup console and enter your Proxmox Credentials into the Protected Item. Once complete, every operation can be done from the Comet Backup console just like any other device supported by Comet Backup.

Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for Faster Incremental Backups​

Because we are leveraging Proxmox's backup tools, we can fully support Changed Block Tracking. This cuts down on transfer time of your backup data by only transferring the blocks that have changed since the last backup. For low change workloads like databases and file servers, this can mean a huge speed-up. Combined with Comet Backups proprietary chunking, you're saving on both transfer and storage.

Restore Virtual Machines to Proxmox VE​

Modern workflows require that we sometimes move on and off certain platforms. Comet Backup is here to help. One feature of Comet Backup is allowing you to backup from one technology and restore to another. In our case, we'll be converting a hardware server to a virtual machine within our Proxmox cluster.

What's new since Beta:​

Since the initial Beta release in Comet 25.8.0 Titan, we've added several key capabilities to make Proxmox support production-ready:

• Proxmox v9 support - Full compatibility with the latest Proxmox VE 9
• Changed Block Tracking (CBT) - Dramatically faster incremental backups
• Non-root user authentication - Enhanced security with role-based access
• Restore to Ceph/RBD storage - Support for distributed storage backends
• LXC container restore - Complete container lifecycle management

Enhancements​

Comet 26.1.0 Iapetus includes numerous enhancements across the platform. These enhancements improve the usability and performance of our product. Improving the concurrency in vault initialization improves large workloads when adding many endpoints or protected items. Better job history formatting for those customers who rely on exporting their job histories for use in 3rd party tools. A full list of enhancements can be found in the release notes.

Performance & Reliability​

• Enhanced job scheduling reliability with better timing alignment
• Improved Storage Vault initialization for concurrent operations
• Better handling of multiple vault encryption keys
• API responses now include JobID for automation workflows

Microsoft 365​

• Improved handling of failed message downloads with automatic fallback methods
• Enhanced calendar API error handling
• Better support for non-default document libraries with faster OneDrive attribution

Management Console​

• Improved password reset workflows with device management options
• Better job history export formatting
• Enhanced authentication for profiles with thousands of Protected Items
• Improved navigation rendering at various screen resolutions

Storage & Platform Support​

• In Comet 25.9.2, Wasabi users can now configure buckets for Wasabi's new US West 2 (San Jose) region
• Better Linux kernel version detection on Debian 13
• Improved Windows Disk Image backups
• Enhanced Storage Gateway SMB disk size reporting

Other Improvements​

• Ukrainian language translation added
• SAS Relic codesigning support
• User home directory sandboxing on Linux
• Support for shared quotas across multiple Storage Vaults, allowing for more flexible storage offerings