Tethys is the latest entry in our quarterly rollup series. It branches off from our main rolling Voyager development into a fixed target for our partners to qualify and build 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.
As always for a new quarterly release, there are two changelogs for 24.8.0 Tethys depending on whether you are coming from the previous quarterly release or the previous Voyager release:
Changes compared to 24.5.4
- The Windows System Backup Protected Item is being deprecated. Windows System Backup Protected Items will still successfully backup, but will show a Warning notice on completion
New Features
- Added new "Back up extra system permissions and attributes" option for File and Folders Protected Items
- Added support for granular restore from FAT32, EXT4, and XFS filesystems
- Added an option to have failed backup jobs retry after a configurable period of time
- Added ability to bulk convert Storage Vaults created with S3-backed Storage Role templates to direct S3 Storage Vaults
- Added support for restoring a Windows Disk Image backup from a Linux device
- Added a Linux ISO option when using the Create Recovery Media feature
- Added SMB Storage Vault option to the Comet Server Service Manager first use wizard
Enhancements
- Added an automatic clean up of stale Storage Vault locks immediately when a device reboots, or wakes from sleep
- Added more device filtering options when creating a Bulk Upgrade campaign in the Comet Server web interface
- Added an option to specify a custom HELO/EHLO hostname when configuring SMTP or MX-Direct email delivery in the Comet Server web interface
- Added support for custom prefix directories for IAM-compatible Storage Template providers
- Added support for Gen 1 VHD virtual disks for Hyper-V Protected Items when using the Hyper-V Latest VM State mode. VHD virtual disks will be stored in a VHDX format
- Added support for configuring IP rate limits in the Comet Server web interface
- Added support for configuring backup job bandwidth limits in different units such as KB/s, Kbit/s or Mbit/s from the Comet Server web interface
- Added a new log message to backups that indicates that all pre-job steps are complete and backup work has begun
- Added a new option in the admin account policies that allows top-level admins to grant tenant admins permission to configure Software Build Role settings
- Added an explanation tooltip for unavailable features in the Create Recovery Media dialog in the Comet Backup desktop app
- Added safeguards to ensure the Hyper-V Protected Item "Latest VM state" and "All VM Snapshots" modes are only used with supported Windows versions, in the Comet Server web interface and the Comet Backup desktop app
- Significantly improved the performance of measuring Storage Vault sizes before a backup job starts
- Improved the performance of evaluating the "if last job was missed" schedule option
- Improved performance for granular restore of NTFS filesystems with complex or deep directory structures
- Improved the performance of retention passes by using cached information to estimate the size of data that is in a Storage Vault
- Improved Hyper-V Latest VM State (Changed Block Tracking) to respect the user's configured Hyper-V checkpoint settings on a per-VM basis instead of always attempting to take Production checkpoints
- Improved the clarity of error messages when data packs are missing from a Storage Vault
- Improved the clarity of error messages when Comet Backup fails to optimize an existing snapshot during a retention pass
- Improved the performance of backup jobs that do not take a filesystem snapshot
- Improved retry behavior for S3 API requests that fail due to "unexpected EOF" errors
- Updated Spanish translation (Thanks to 'donlaiq')
- Updated the MySQL Protected Item to prefer mariadb-dump over mysqldump on Linux devices
- Updated Microsoft 365 account listing to append "Disabled" attribute to user mailboxes for later informed inclusion at the UI level
- Allowed retention passes to safely continue with a warning if Comet is unable to clean up deleted tombstoned file versions from an S3-compatible target
- Reduced the memory usage when Constellation Role is deleting a very large bucket
Changes compared to 24.6.10
- No changes