Onguard Backup allows multiple computers to backup to the same account, and it allows each computer to restore data from any of the computers backed up to its account.  There are times when a computer crashes and is replaced with a new one, and one wishes for the new computer to resume the backups of the computer it replaced.  To accomplish this you simply need to impersonate its predecessor.

To impersonate a different computer (so that you can permanently backup and restore as the old computer), first launch the GUI using the -account parameter as follows:

1. Open the Windows Command Prompt as Administrator
2. Change directories to the installation directory and launch the GUI in -account mode
3. at the prompt: C:\Users\Administrator>, type in: cd \
4. at the prompt: C:\>, type in: cd Program Files
5. at the prompt: C:\Program Files>, type in: cd Onguard
6. at the prompt: C:\Program Files\Onguard>, type in Onguard_gui.exe -account

You’ll now see an “Account” tab:

You can change the Domain/Computer for this software client using the pull-down menu near the bottom of the window and then clicking on the “Impersonate selected domain/computer…”.

You should only impersonate another computer if it is no longer online (i.e. it can’t backup anymore) and you wish this computer to continue on with its backups and restores.  If you wish to just restore from another computer then please refer to the restore article which shows how to do this.

Onguard Backup allows you to control where you backup to, whether it’s to a local hard drive or our remote storage vault by going to the Backup->Settings tab.

For example, you can specify whether you would like to backup to a local folder in addition to backing up to a remote server, as well as whether you wish these backups to run in parallel, or for the remote backup to wait until your local backup has completed.

Please note that choosing “Rigorous sync” will force the vault synchronization process, either at end of a backup or using the manual “Synchronize all Backup vaults…” button, to check for the presence of each block in each vault’s storage (disk) against what the backup history believes is present which will slow down synchronization substantially when millions of blocks are present in vaults.  This option is used if your backup host suspects they have lost some blocks and they are using multiple vaults or the client has a local and remote vault.

To support users in rotating local backups offsite, one may use the “For offsite rotation..” option to have your local backup folder copied to the rotatable folder, which is usually a USB drive.

The E-Mail tab allows you to configure the client to send you e-mails after each backup, as well as tell your backup host when you would like to be alerted if your client does not connect to the backup server to send data (or it connects but doesn’t send any data).

To configure the client to send e-mails it must have an e-mail account to use.

To send all your backup logs to someone, for example technical support, simply fill in the email address you’d like all your logs emailed to and click the “E-Mail logs now to:” button.

You can modify where temporary files are created and where logs are stored (and for how long) on Backup->Settings tab:

Similarly you can specify how many days of logs to preserve in the above folder on that same tab using the following control:

The temporary folder is used as temporary scratch working space to do things such as dump Microsoft Exchange so that eseutil can be run, to compress and uncompress files, to encrypt and decrypt files. etc.  In general, the maximum space used in the temporary folder is a little more then 3X the size of the largest file being backed up.  Since files can be processed in parallel, this factor needs to be multiplied by the number of files currently being backed up simultaneously (which is usually in the single digits).

You can control how much free space to keep on any volumes which data is written to (such as temporary folder, log folder, restore folder) via opening the GUI in expert mode and changing the following setting on the Expert Settings tab.

There are some advanced settings you may wish to take advantage of on the Backup->Settings tab.

Onguard Remote Backup compresses files before backing them up.  The default compression level is 5 (medium) which is roughly equivalent to the same amount of compression you will see with utilities such as zip using their defaults.  A value of zero (0) means no compression and a value of 10 means maximum compression.  The compression setting you use will impact the length of time it takes to backup a file, where the higher the level of compression you specify, the longer the pre-processing of the file will take but shorter the transfer of the file will take (smaller files take less time to transfer over the Internet then larger files).

An important thing to keep in mind is that the higher level of compression you use, the less likely it will be for efficient delta-block differentials to occur, so increasing the compression level might ironically cause your backup transfer times and storage to increase over time when backing up large files which change daily.  For this reason we recommend using a setting of 5 or less for compression.

Historically, backup applications utilized the archive flags on files to determine which files have changed and need to be backed up.  When legacy backup applications encounter a file with its archive flag set, then then backup the file and clear the flag.  This legacy approach only works when users ran a single backup application — however if multiple solutions are used then the one which backs up a file clears the flag and the other doesn’t know the file has changed so it doesn’t back it up.  As a result, our software client does not look at the archive flags on files at all.  However, we allow you to specify that the software client clears the flag on each file it backs up.

There maybe occasions when certain applications, such as mysql, may need to be stopped before a backup commences, and then restarted afterward.  You can specify EXE files to execute, or command prompt commands to run, on the Backup->Settings tab as shown below.

If you are running command prompt (DOS) commands, then you’ll need to be sure to  enclose the command in double quotes and invoke the command prompt interpreter, where an example would be:
cmd /c “C:\myscripts\dumpdbs.BAT”

Since you can specify arbitrary commands, the “Test” button has no way of knowing whether the commands executed successfully, so please be sure, after using the “Test” button, that your commands accomplished what you want.  A common error when creating BAT files is forgetting to change the working directory to where your files or scripts are at the beginning of the BAT file (using the CD command).

Next Article: Monitoring Your Backups