Introducing CloudBerry Backup for Windows Azure Blob Storage

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup for Azure 1.5.1 and later.

CloudBerry S3 Backup is a powerful Windows backup and restore that automate backup and restore processes to Amazon S3 cloud storage. With release 1.5 we introduce support for Windows Azure Blob Storage accounts.

CloudBerry Backup for Windows Azure has exactly the same feature set as CloudBerry S3 Backup:

Features:

• Easy installation and configuration
• Scheduling capabilities
• Data encryption
• Data retention schedule
• Secure online storage
• Data versioning
• Differential backup
• The ability to restore to a particular date
• Backup verification
• Alerting notifications
• Backup Window
• Backup exclusively locked files using Volume Shadow Copy
• Parallel data transfer - speed up backup/restore process
• Command Line interface - integrate backup with your own routines
• C# API - an ability to get backup plan statistics programatically
• Scheduling service. No dependency on Windows Task Scheduler
• The version specifically designed for Windows Home Server

If you don’t have an account registers yet you should register it as shown on the screen below. If you are an existing CloudBerry Explorer for Azure customer you will be able to import your existing accounts.

The rest works just as if you were using Amazon S3.

Special offer for beta testers

CloudBerry Backup for Azure is free while in beta. All beta users will get a free license when the product is released. To claim your free license in the future you will need to register your copy.

Why use Windows Azure?

Advantage and disadvantages of Azure Blob storage is well outside of the scope of this article, but one thing we want to mention here. Azure storage comes with a built-in chunking mechanism. In other words, it will break down larger files into smaller chunks for you to make an upload more reliable and then it will automatically combine a file once all chunks reach the storage.

What’s next?

In the coming release of CloudBerry Backup for Azure we are planning to support page blobs. To make a long story short I will just say that these types of blobs allow you to modify only a given portion of the blob. This will allow us to implement a block level (or differential) backup relatively easy. Once this feature is in place you will be able to back up large files such as Outlook PST files, MS SQL Server backup files, MS Exchange Data files and Intuit databases in a very efficient manner. You will not have to re-upload the whole file but only the modified portion saving on upload time and transfer costs.

CloudBerry Backup for Azure is a Windows program that leverages Azure Blob storage. You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=backup-az . It comes with onetime fee of $29.99 (US) per copy (currently free while in beta).