Fixed an issue with email settings for Comet Hosted.
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
Saturn 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.
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and is the second-largest planet in our solar system, after Jupiter. It is large enough that it can fit more than 760 Earths inside it.
Despite its enormous size, Saturn has a relatively fast rotation. A day on Saturn lasts only about 10.7 hours. This rapid rotation causes the planet to flatten slightly at the poles and bulge at the equator.
Saturn has been known since ancient times, and its rings were first observed by Galileo Galilei in 1610. The true nature of the rings was identified by Christiaan Huygens in 1655.
As for the software, Comet 23.11.0 Saturn brings 8 new features and 23 enhancements, including our new VMware Protected Item type.
As always for a new quarterly release, there are two changelogs for 23.11.0 Saturn depending on whether you are coming from the previous quarterly release or the previous Voyager release:
Added new VMware Protected Item type. Comet supports both the free and paid versions of VMware ESXi for backups and restores
Added a lobby option to the Comet Backup desktop app installers, allowing for silent installation with fully-remote device authentication via the Devices page in the Comet Server web interface
Updated the name of the Connected Devices page to Devices in the Comet Server web interface and redesigned the page to show all devices
Added bulk actions to the Devices page in the Comet Server web interface
Added support for restoring Disk image backups as VMware-compatible virtual disks
Added new “Comet Storage” and “Comet Storage (Object Lock)” storage destinations, allowing users to select Comet’s new bundled Wasabi storage option for Storage Vaults (including Storage Templates)
Added the ability to enforce policies created by a top-level administrator onto tenant administrators and tenant users. This allows top-level administrators to enforce settings and preferences across an entire Comet Server
Protected Item types that are not compatible with the device operating system will now be greyed out and disabled in the Comet Server web interface
Added the ability to mark jobs that are stuck in the running state as abandoned if they are unable to be cancelled in the Comet Server web interface
Changed clients on Linux platforms to log to stdin/stderr for background services
Improved the performance of restoring data from backups which contain large amounts of blank data, such as Disk Images
Improved Comet Server behavior when it fails to start due to license issues. It now starts successfully with limited functionality and displays an error message indicating how to identify the issue
Added logging of the reason the job started at the beginning of backup job logs
Added option to aggregate usage by Account Name for Gradient PSA integration
Added automatic cancellation of running jobs using a Storage Vault when that Storage Vault is deleted
Improved the appearance of the “About” window in the Comet Server Service Manager
Reduced memory usage when loading large index files from Comet Server Storage Role-type Storage Vaults
Renamed “Restore files and folders” to “Granular restore” when restoring files and folders from a Disk Image or Hyper-V backup
Added a new template for Amazon S3 and Wasabi Storage Templates to make it easier to set Object Lock on a template.
Added ability to configure server audit file logging from the Comet Server web interface
Significantly improved the speed of granular restores from Disk Image backups
Improved the performance of restoring files and/or folders from Disk Image backups
Significantly improved performance when restoring directories containing only a few files from a File and Folder Protected Item
Updated the Activity browser filter names in the Comet Backup desktop app to better clarify their functionality
Slightly changed the appearance of the Comet Backup desktop app About dialog
Improve security posture of the Comet Server web interface by adding additional XSS protections
Updated the preconfigured exclusion list for File and Folder Protected Items on the Comet Server web interface with valid exclusions
Lowered memory usage when uploading to S3-backed Storage Vaults in some use cases
Removed the device dropdown in the Comet Server web interface when adding a Protected Item when there’s only one device
Improved the admin accounts dialogue to have a separate Policies tab in the Comet Server web interface
Fixed an issue with the Comet Server web interface showing an internal error popup when the server is first started
Fixed an issue with the Comet Server web interface throwing an error before valid VMware credentials have been added
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
Fixed an issue with ‘not found in index’ error messages when restoring from some recent backup job snapshots that were created simultaneously with a retention pass
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
Fixed an issue with compatibility with Cloudflare R2 S3-compatible storage service
Fixed an issue with granular restore of symlinks when Comet Backup is running on a non-Windows OS
Fixed an issue with granular restore of NTFS partitions on MBR with an invalid partition type flag
Fixed an issue with inconsistent behaviour of granular restore from Disk Image backups where the partition table was not included
Fixed an issue with granular restore of disk images if the image is contained within a directory with certain names
Fixed an issue with granular restore when selecting files from a Disk Image partition extent following a deselected extent
Fixed an issue with missing non-disk-image files when browsing parent directories in granular restore mode
Fixed an issue with missing partition names for display in granular restore mode
Fixed a cosmetic issue with the dropdown mode selector for Hyper-V Protected Items
Fixed an issue causing excessive memory usage when compressing large index files during a retention pass
Fixed a cosmetic issue with the Disk Image restore dialog in the Comet Server web interface and the Comet Backup desktop app
Fixed a cosmetic issue with the Object Lock configuration in the Comet Server web interface
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
Fixed an issue with the Comet Server stats endpoint returning Internal Error in some specific scenarios.
Fixed an issue with the Comet Server stats processing returning incorrect stats for previous days
Fixed an issue with browsing and restoring one or more files from Hyper-V backup
Fixed an issue with CVE-2023-44487 HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Attack
Fixed an issue with Files and Folders Protected Items being configurable through the Comet Server web interface while restricted by policy
Fixed a cosmetic issue with pixelated text in the Comet Backup desktop app on multi-screen setups
Fixed a cosmetic issue with the ‘Configure’ text being in the wrong location in the Comet Backup desktop app
Fixed an issue with Storage Vault configuration if the Object Lock duration was set to zero days
Fixed an issue with Virtual Storage Vault policy options being available incorrectly when configuring a schedule for a Protected Item
Fixed an issue with the list of allowed Storage Vault types not being immediately visible when editing admin permissions in the Comet Server web interface for an admin user with the “Restrict available Storage Vault types” setting enabled
Fixed an issue with a non-existent empty Protected Item being shown in the Comet Backup desktop app after restoring a snapshot from other device
Fixed an issue with the Restore dialog in the Comet Backup desktop app showing snapshots from another devices as if they were from the current device
Fixed an issue with the Policy Protected Items getting multiple unknown entries when the dialog for the OS picker is cancelled.
Fixed an issue where Microsoft 365 email backups would error instead of warn for server-side retrieval failures
Fixed an issue with the desktop application not launching after installation when “Launch Comet Backup” is checked on Windows Server
Fixed an issue with handling unexpected files inside an S3-compatible storage location
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
Fixed an issue with CVE-2023-44487 HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Attack
Fixed an issue with MySQL streaming restore raising packet size errors when restoring large blobs
Fixed an issue that prevented using Spanned storage for Storage Role in the Comet Server web interface
Fixed a cosmetic issue with spacing around the warning message when viewing stale vault analysis information in the Comet Server web interface
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
Significantly improved the speed of granular restores from Disk Image backups
Improved the performance of restoring files and/or folders from Disk Image backups
Updated the Activity browser filter names in the Comet Backup desktop app to better clarify their functionality
Slight visual change to the Comet Backup desktop app About dialog
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
Comet Backup Offers All-In-One Backup Solution for Businesses and IT Providers with Integrated Cloud Storage Powered by Wasabi
CHRISTCHURCH / BOSTON – November 1, 2023 –Comet Backup, announced an expansion of their long-standing partnership with Wasabi Technologies today. This partnership fully integrates Wasabi’s cloud storage offering into Comet Backup’s software allowing IT providers and IT teams an easy all-in-one backup solution.
Comet Backup empowers IT professionals to manage backup data for all of their clients through a single interface, complete with built-in monitoring and reporting features. By integrating Wasabi hot cloud storage into Comet Backup’s platform, IT providers now have a convenient all-in-one solution for backup and cloud storage. At 80% less than the cost of Amazon S3 with no fees for data egress or API requests and no vendor lock-in, Wasabi provides a scalable, long-term cloud storage option at an affordable price.
“The IT industry is seeing an increased demand for fast, easy-to-use solutions to protect business-critical data. With organizations facing growing security threats, it is vital for companies to have systems in place to ensure business continuity,” said Josh Flores, General Manager of Comet Backup. “We equip IT teams with the tools they need to deliver simple, affordable data protection. We’re excited to partner with Wasabi to allow our customers to centralize their backup strategy and streamline their workflows. The flexibility and cost-savings Wasabi offer make them the perfect partner for this solution.”
By offering Comet Storage powered by Wasabi, IT teams no longer need to set up a separate storage account, or manage multiple vendors. Comet users will pay a single bill for both backup and storage, at the same low price as buying storage directly from Wasabi. With a unified backup and cloud storage solution, companies can spend less time managing their technology stack, and instead focus on their customers, their core competencies, and their bottom line.
“Comet Storage powered by Wasabi is now making it easier than ever for managed service providers and IT professionals to leverage the cloud through a single billing, monitoring and reporting interface. Wasabi is excited to be integrated into this solution,” said Laurie Mitchell, Wasabi Technologies SVP Global Marketing. “The result is a cohesive backup and storage solution that’s perfect for MSPs and IT teams to keep things simple and cost effective.”
For more information on Comet Backup and Wasabi, please visit our dedicated landing page.
Comet provides fast, secure backup software for IT professionals and businesses worldwide, localizing to 13 languages. It enables organizations to secure their data, deliver business continuity and disaster preparedness. Trusted by customers across 120 countries, Comet has been recognized as a momentum leader by G2 and awarded “Best Software” and “Most Affordable” by Software Suggest. Founded by the same team who built MyClient and Nexus (now a J2 Global company), Comet is a privately held company based in Christchurch, New Zealand.
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
“What’s New?” is a series of blog posts covering recent changes to Comet in more detail. This article covers the latest changes in Comet Voyager over October 2023.
There were four Comet software releases during October, all in the 23.9.x Voyager release series.
Comet 23.9.7 adds support for backing up VMware virtual machines.
This has been a long-standing request on our Feature Voting page. After running a successful beta program over the last few months, we’re very happy to be able to deliver this feature to partners in our Voyager track.
Comet’s new VMware Protected Item type allows you to easily connect to your ESXi or vCenter server. You can pick individual VMs for backup across all datacenters, or choose “All VMs” to ensure all VMs are backed up with targeted exclusions.
The feature supports Changed Block Tracking. After completing an initial backup job, any future backup jobs will coordinate with the VMware host server to identify which ranges of the disk have changed since the previous backup job. These changed ranges from the VMware server are adapted into content-defined boundaries for Comet’s deduplicating chunking engine. This results in an extremely efficient, incremental-forever backup.
As this is a new Protected Item type, it must be configured to run from an installed device that will perform the compression and encryption workload. Installing Comet Backup on a VM within the VMware server itself is recommended for reduced end-to-end latency. In this first released version in Comet 23.9.7, this feature requires the device to be running Windows x86_64.
We are excited to bring this new Protected Item type to our entire Comet Community, so look out for our upcoming quarterly software release at the end of this month. We’d love your feedback and are here to help if you need any assistance getting started, reach out via our support ticket system.
It’s official – Comet Storage is a new cloud storage offering from Comet, in partnership with Wasabi. We offer Wasabi’s same great S3-compatible service, at no additional cost above their public pricing. The feature is fully integrated and managed from within your account.cometbackup.com account, giving you unified billing and reporting across both cloud storage and your backup software licenses.
Comet Backup will continue to support a wide range of cloud storage providers. However, the new all-in-one Comet Storage offering is both highly convenient and excellent value. If you are interested in migrating to Comet Storage from an existing Wasabi account or from another cloud provider, please contact us for migration assistance.
Comet Storage also supports S3 Object Lock, allowing the backed-up data to be marked as immutable. This is a complete defense against ransomware attacking the backup storage location itself, giving you a fixed number of days to identify and mitigate the issue. In the latest version of Comet, we’ve also made Object Lock easier to use for all supported Object Lock-compatible providers, by simplifying the configuration options for both Storage Vaults and Storage Templates.
For more information, please see the documentation, or check out our latest YouTube video:
New account.cometbackup.com user interface design
Every element on the page has been given a fresh coat of paint – from buttons to popups, from paying your bill to raising a support ticket. We’ve also grouped some pages together in a more logical way, so you’ll find it simpler to make your way around the site.
Inspired by the similar change to the Comet Server web interface earlier this year, the new design has moved the main navigation bar from the top to the left-hand side. This change brings our branding more closely in line across these two interfaces. On devices with smaller screens, such as laptops and tablets, you can click the small arrow button to collapse the navigation bar and regain horizontal screen real estate.
Comet supports backing up physical Disk Images, Hyper-V virtual machines, and VMware virtual machines. All of these different Protected Item types result in virtual disk files. Comet supports granular restore for all three types, allowing you to browse through partitions and supported filesystems, to restore individual files from within a full disk backup.
In the latest versions of Comet, we’ve significantly improved the speed of granular restores from Disk Image backups. Some particular use-cases seeing a large improvement are granular restores involving a large number of directories, or a large quantity of small files. We’re committed to continuing to improve Comet’s performance and this work has identified more opportunities for improvement across all three types, so watch this space!
We’ve also added a feature to restore Disk Image backup jobs as VMware vSphere-compatible virtual disks.
Both Disk Image and our new VMware Protected Item type generate virtual *.vmdk files inside Comet’s deduplicated Storage Vault. However, the subformat of the files does differ slightly. Until now, users who are using Comet to perform a physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration from a physical disk to a VMware virtual machine have been required to perform an extra file format conversion after the restore, requiring extra time and temporary disk space. With the new option in Comet to restore the disk in VMware vSphere-compatible file format, the conversion takes place dynamically as part of the restore job, simplifying the process and helping meet your recovery time objective (RTO).
Earlier this year, we added Audit Logging support to the self-hosted Comet Server product, to help our partners meet their compliance obligations. Since then, we’ve expanded the list of audit properties, and added a helpful option to configure this feature directly from the Comet Server web interface from the Settings page on the “License & Access” tab.
The new controls should make it much more accessible to configure Audit Logging support for your Comet Server.
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
Fixed an issue with the Comet Server stats processing returning incorrect stats for previous days
Fixed an issue in Comet Server web interface where creating or editing a custom Storage Vault can cause invalid Object Lock settings
About Version 2 Limited Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About Comet We are a team of dedicated professionals committed to developing reliable and secure backup solutions for MSP’s, Businesses and IT professionals. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, we understand the importance of having a reliable backup solution in place to protect your valuable data. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of backup solutions that are easy to use, scalable and highly secure.
