2 posts tagged with "year-in-review"

As 2024 wraps up, we want to thank all our partners and the Comet community for your support. Here's to a productive 2025!

It's been a big year at Comet and we want to take a moment to reflect and celebrate some of our highlights from 2024. The Comet community is at the center of everything we do. We've rolled out new product features and enhancements, solved issues, and kept things moving in support and customer success. In early December, we hosted our end of year company conference, CometCon.

Let's take a look at some of the big Comet news and achievements from 2024.

New feature highlights in 2024​

Linux Disk Image​

In November, Comet added Linux Disk Image which is a major highlight for us. With Linux Disk Image you can protect all of your Linux devices and eliminate the hassle of reinstalling and configuring devices from scratch when a disaster occurs. If you'd like to know more about Linux Disk Image, you can read our blog post about it here.

Hyper-V Changed Block Tracking​

In May, we improved our Hyper-V Protected Item by adding Changed Block Tracking (CBT) support for Hyper-V virtual machines. Hyper-V CBT performs efficient backups of Hyper-V virtual machines by only reading blocks of a virtual disk that have changed since the last backup job. This means Hyper-V backups complete faster and upload less data.

Configurable Backup Job Retries​

In August, we rolled out our new feature to configure how often a backup job should retry when it encounters an issue. When a backup job encounters an issue, it can lead to manual interventions or escalations to your technical team. Both of these are time consuming and frustrating when they occur.

Our new Configurable Retries feature allows you to configure how many times a backup should attempt to retry when an error occurs, and how long it should wait to retry the job again. When this feature is configured, Comet will not mark a backup job as failed if it going to retry again later. Instead it will be marked as "Running (retry)" so you are able to see that Comet is still trying to get a successful backup.

New Comet-Hosted Regions​

Comet-Hosted is our turnkey backup solution, designed to help partners quickly set up and start running backups with ease. In 2024, we've added support for Comet-Hosted Servers to be created in London (Europe) and Sydney (Australia). This means customers in London or Australia who have compliance requirements or wanted their Comet-Hosted Server to be located closer to their customers can now use Comet-Hosted.

Looking forward to 2025​

Don't forget to visit our Feature Voting page to share your ideas or vote on existing ones. We regularly use this feedback to shape our development priorities.

We're keeping our 2025 plans under wraps for the moment. We are excited to share more of our plans with you soon.

Another year has flown by. Thank you to all our partners for your support over the year and our best wishes for 2024.

At Comet, we've had a busy year full of new product features, fixes and enhancements, new marketing initiatives, support, onboarding, sales, and company conferences. During this holiday season at the end of the year and the start of the next, let's take a short look back at some of the big Comet news from 2023.

New feature highlights in 2023​

In October, Comet added support for backing up VMware virtual machines. Our new Protected Item type was a major highlight of the year. It supports both single ESXi hosts and vSphere clusters, and uses Changed Block Tracking for excellent performance - on both paid and free ESXi licenses. All VMs are compressed and deduplicated inside Comet's Storage Vault system. Comet supports granular restore of individual files from within the VM, and also physical to virtual (P2V) migration from Disk Image backups into VMware format.

This big feature release deserved a big new planet, and we bumped our version codename to 23.11.0 Saturn after many versions spent in Jupiter's moons.

In November we also took the wraps off our Comet Storage product. We now offer an integrated, S3-compatible cloud storage solution, with great performance and with datacenters in multiple regions around the globe. This service is powered by our friends at Wasabi Cloud Storage, and we pass on Wasabi's own list pricing with no additional markup, giving you the convenience of a single bill.

Object Lock is an S3 feature for immutable storage. This provides a layer of defense against ransomware attacks, by preventing leaked credentials from damaging the backup storage location. In 2023 Comet gained support for using Object Lock on some S3-compatible destinations including AWS S3, Wasabi Cloud Storage, and Comet Storage, alongside our pre-existing support for immutable storage on Backblaze B2.

Over the course of the year, we also undertook a major project to refresh and modernize many parts of our user interface. Starting with the Comet Server web interface in April, we continued to update the Comet Backup desktop app in August, and the Comet Account Portal in November. The new designs look great, are easier to use, and should serve us well for many years to come.

We've had many more successful features over the course of the year, such as WebDAV support; single-sign-on with OIDC; improvements to Audit Logging; our official Docker container; new Recent Activity email reports; granular restore for Hyper-V; a new system for live-connected devices; Azure Key Vault integration; and many performance improvements.

Looking forwards into 2024​

As always, please take a look at our Feature Voting page and raise your ideas, or upvote any existing ideas. We look at this system often to help prioritize our development.

We're keeping our plans under wraps for the moment - but as always, you can expect to see many of your requests ticked off this list!