With version 24.9, the Cove Data Protection team has made some exciting changes. First, we simplified user offboarding in Cove for Microsoft 365 in a number of important ways. We also increased the reliability and accuracy of Recovery Testing, expanded Entra ID support, added support for new OS versions, introduced better bandwidth usage controls, and more.

Cove for Microsoft 365

Let’s start with a look at some changes aimed at streamlining Microsoft 365 administration and increasing technician efficiency in Cove for Microsoft 365.

First, we simplified reporting of offboarded Microsoft 365 users in in two important ways:

1. There is now a M365 Offboarded Billable Users column in the dashboard. This displays the number of users which are offboarded under Microsoft, but still billable under Cove.
2. Users can now filter by ‘Deleted,’ ‘Licensed,’ and ‘Unlicensed’ in the Protected Users tab.

We also made a change that improves user onboarding. Now, new users are automatically scheduled at the top of the backup queue to ensure their backups start immediately.

Cove Microsoft user management

We also made an update aimed at improving the user experience for partners using Microsoft Entra ID.  Now, when a user is provisioned via Entra ID, the First Name and Last Name fields are hidden on the Add User popup and are disabled on the Edit User popup in Cove.

Note: API authentication is not supported for users that are provisioned using Entra ID. If you still need to use Cove through the API, designate a user for that purpose (do not convert it to Entra ID).

Cove Continuity

On the Continuity side, the focus was on enhancing reliability. To that end, we made the following fixes:

Boot Detection for Standby Image to ESXi: Made changes aimed at reducing the number of unsuccessful restores that previously resulted in a “Timeout reached” error.

Boot Detection for Recovery Testing: Addressed a corner case where an unsuccessful boot resulted in a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).

Standby Image and Recovery Testing:

• Fixed “Error #700: Failed to initialize virtual disk file: Cannot resize disk; the partition is too small.”
• Improved the boot mechanism for Windows Server 2012 R2 devices, addressing the issue that led to “Getting devices ready” screenshots.

Standby Image: Resolved the root cause of unsuccessful restores that resulted in a “Database is locked” error.