The Cove Data Protection team is excited to announce that Standby Image Rollback is now available. This new capability allows users to quickly and easily rollback to an earlier version of Standby Image if the latest one is corrupted or compromised. With this release, we’ve also added Microsoft 365 Restore to Alternate User, improved the delta restore mechanism for Standby Image to Azure, and made several reliability updates and fixes.

Introducing Standby Image Rollback!

Standby Image Rollback enables fast recovery of a Standby Image from any previous backup session. It is ideal for cyber recovery use cases where a Standby Image has been corrupted, because it lets users revert data and system state to a point in time before the attack. Standby Image Rollback rebuilds a new image from the selected recovery point (backup session), eliminating the need to store older backup images for this purpose, reducing storage demands while preserving RTOs.

Cove for Microsoft 365 Restore to Alternate User

We also added the ability to restore Microsoft 365 data to an alternate licensed user in the same domain. This update streamlines employee offboarding, role changes and internal transfers, improves account compromise recovery, eases legal investigations or compliance audits, and more.

Note: If for any reason now or in the future, you would like to turn this capability off, please contact Support. 

Cove Backup Manager updates

We made several updates to the Cove Backup Manager, including:

MacOS 15 Sequoia support: MacOS 15 was added to officially supported data sources and the backup statistic posting for devices running macOS 15 was updated accordingly.

Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-session Instances reporting: Previously, Multi-session Instances were reported as servers in Cove. However, this was confusing for customers and in some cases led to unexpected backup costs. Now, these instances will be reported as workstations, and billing will be applied as workstations.

Backup speed optimization: Backup Manager’s change tracking mechanism has been improved specifically to increase backup speed for large files. With this change, a backup job including 10,000 10 GB files will be backed up 13 times faster, while a job including 1,000 100 GB will be backed up 80 times faster.

Improved posting of status about synchronization between Local Speedvault and Storage Nodes: Previously, synchronization status was updated only after a backup statistic was posted (every eight hours). With this update, status updates occur right after synchronization is completed.

Fixed issue with bandwidth throttling configuration: Fixed a bandwidth throttling issue impacting protected devices that had been offline for more than two days.

Linux Debian 8 device Backup Manager installation: After adding support for systemd in Linux, an issue emerged when installing Backup Manager on devices with the Debian 8 operating system. With this release, the issue has been resolved.

Retention improvements/fixes

We made two important fixes to Cove’s recently enhanced Retention Policies.

1. We resolved an issue occurring when creating a device via unattended installation, where the “30 days’’ default policy was not being set.
2. The “learn more” link in the Retention policies banner now goes to the correct documentation.

Additional improvements/fixes

With this update, we improved the delta restore mechanism for Standby Image to Azure. This change is aimed at easing technician workloads by reducing the frequency of delta restore failures and the time-consuming full restore required following a delta restore failure.

To eliminate potential BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) issues during the Bare Metal Restore (BMR) process, we updated the boot image to Windows 11 PE. We also fixed an issue where the OS selection screenshot was incorrectly classified as a failed boot.

We resolved the error message: “Number of virtual devices exceeds the maximum for a given controller,” and improved the logic for delta restores after a VM has booted, ensuring faster and more reliable restore speeds following the boot event. Finally, “search by customer ID” was added to Customer Management.

End of life: Native CMC and FreeBSD support

Cove’s native Cloud Management Console (Native CMC) will reach its End of Life on December 1, 2024. We strongly recommend transitioning to the backup.management console as soon as possible. As of December 1, 2024, you will no longer be able to access the Native CMC.

Effective March 1, 2025, the FreeBSD OS will no longer be supported on Storage Nodes.