The Cove team plans to release the newest version of the product on June 14-15. Version 23.6 will include enhancements to the newly available Standby Image to Azure feature, as well as other performance and usability improvements.

Cove Continuity
This release offers several enhancements to further improve the experience of using Cove’s Standby Image feature with Microsoft Azure.

• Standby Image (Azure) now includes the ability to customize the frequency of boot testing, giving you more control to balance test frequency with Azure cost containment.
• When restoring to Azure, you now have the option to either keep the restored VM booted, or to switch it off to reduce Azure compute costs.
• Restore to Azure/Standby Image(Azure) now offers the ability to skip NSG and public IP creation during restore. By default, the Network Security Group (NSG) and public IP will be created and assigned to the target VM. The NSG helps control inbound and outbound network traffic to the VM. Creating these resources can save you time, especially if you plan to use a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection to the target VM.

With this release we’ve also renamed the menu section for all these options “Continuity,” rather than “Recovery,” to highlight the business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities of Cove. At the same time, we also separated the management and reporting menu sections for greater ease of use.

Microsoft 365 protection
With this release, we have added a new accelerator to make OneDrive backups faster. This is being rolled out to partners in groups between now and early July. This change is expected to deliver up to ten times faster OneDrive backups.

Additional enhancements

• An interactive Recovery Guide has been added to the Help section of the management console. This guide will help you quickly determine the most suitable Cove recovery tool to use for optional results.
• New global backup exclusions for MacOS: To improve performance and reduce errors, we have implemented a new set of exclusions for MacOS devices. Specifically, system files and paths protected by System Integrity Protection (SIP) are now excluded from backups.
• Enhanced installation mechanism to avoid duplicate billing: To avoid accidental addition of the same machine to backup schedules more than once, a new internal check has been added to the automated deployment process. If a login call shows the device is already present in Cove, the installation will fail, avoiding potential duplicate billing issues.
• To better support consistent and reliable recovery experiences across data sources, we have made a change to the back-end permission check process when doing file and folder backups. This change will result in slower than usual backups the first time files and folders are backed up after this release. This is a one-time process, and fast incremental backups will resume immediately after.