Windows Server 8 beta was released along with the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The server version of operating system is also expected to be released later this year.
Detailing about its Online Backup Services for Windows Server 8 on their official
blog post, Microsoft revealed some of the detailed features of the Online Backup Services on Windows Server 8 which allows files and folders to be backed up and recovered from the cloud in order to provide off-site protection against data loss due to disasters allowing the admins to back up and protect critical data. It uses the Windows Azure platform specifically Windows Azure blob storage for storing customer data.
Here are some of the key features of the Backup Services
■ Simple configuration and management. The backup service integrates with the familiar Windows Server Backup utility in order to provide a seamless backup and recovery experience to a local disk, or to the cloud.
■ Block level incremental backups. The Microsoft Online Backup Agent performs incremental backups by tracking file and block level changes and only transferring the changed blocks, hence reducing the storage and bandwidth utilization. Different point-in-time versions of the backups use storage efficiently by only storing the changes blocks between these versions.
■ Data compression, encryption and throttling. The Microsoft Online Backup Agent ensures that data is compressed and encrypted on the server before being sent to the Microsoft Online Backup Service over the network. As a result, the Microsoft Online Backup Service only stores encrypted data in the cloud storage. The encryption passphrase is not available to the Microsoft Online Backup Service, and as a result the data is never decrypted in the service. Also, users can setup throttling and configure how the Microsoft Online Backup service utilizes the network bandwidth when backing up or restoring information.
■ Data integrity is verified in the cloud. In addition to the secure backups, the backed up data is also automatically checked for integrity once the backup is done. As a result, any corruptions which may arise due to data transfer can be easily identified and they are fixed in next backup automatically.
■ Configurable retention policies for storing data in the cloud. The Microsoft Online Backup Service accepts and implements retention policies to recycle backups that exceed the desired retention range, thereby meeting business policies and managing backup costs.
The Backup Service however only supports Windows Server 8 and not the Windows 8 Consumer Preview version of it or any prior versions of Windows operating systems for that matter. Checkout the
blog post for detailed steps for Registering Microsoft Backup Services.
