You asked for it, and we delivered! We are happy to announce that partners now can schedule Standby Image first restores. We also automated the addition of antivirus exclusions to Microsoft Defender on the Recovery Location for One-Time Restores. Finally, we made several fixes and enhancements to Continuity and Cloud-to-Cloud and added support for new Linux versions.

Standby Image First Restore Scheduling

Now partners can schedule Standby Image first restores overnight or on weekends to avoid resource contention when adding multiple machines to a plan.

One-Time Restore Automated Antivirus Exclusions

Additionally, several partners reported suboptimal restore speeds for One-Time Restores. Our research revealed that, in 90% of the cases, it was because certain processes were not manually added to the antivirus exclusions in Microsoft Defender. To mitigate this issue, we have automated the addition of antivirus exclusions to Microsoft Defender on the Recovery Location.

Fixes and enhancements

24.6 also includes several fixes and enhancements, which are outlined below:

Continuity

• We fixed an issue where Hyper-V Recovery Testing sometimes failed to boot with a “No operating system was loaded” error.
• We also remediated an issue where Recovery Testing failed with a “Could not take a screenshot” error associated with widescreen aspect ratio screenshots.
• We also fixed an issue causing boot tests to be reported as failed despite screenshots proving everything was functioning correctly in Azure agents with restricted internet connection.

Cloud-To-Cloud

• Improved loading speed of mailboxes in the Restore Exchange Wizard
• Improved Microsoft 365 Exchange backup to resolve errors resulting in “Attachment processed before its parent or parents was not restored” message

Linux

• Added support for the latest Linux versions: RedHat 7,8,9; CentOS 7,8,9; Debian 10,11,12; Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS
• Support for RedHat and Ubuntu were added
• Added Systemd support
• Improved the Backup Manager installation and update experience

Customer-facing issues

We also made several changes aimed at reducing the impact of backups on end customer machines.

• Improved backup performance for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services by up to 100x
• Optimized memory usage during file and folder backup by up to 15x
• Improved default exclusion mechanism for files and folders and system state backup to reduce the frequency of backup errors.