Big news from the R1Soft Support Team:

In a continuing effort to improve the R1Soft customer support experience, we have launched a new Customer Support Portal that will help you find the information you are looking for, open and manage cases, and access the R1Soft Wiki and the R1Soft Community Forum, all from one web page.

Some important notes on the new portal:

If you are an existing customer -

- You should have received your new login credentials via email on 9/12 or 9/13. (Searching your inbox? Look for the sender support-inbound (at) r1soft dot com.)

- If you did NOT receive your new login info, reset your password using the “Forgot Password” link on the Support home page. (Having trouble? Try clearing your cache before resetting).

- Good news!: Your case history will be available to you in the new portal.

If you are a NEW customer -

- Please register for your support account

Over the coming weeks, the Support team will continue to make refinements to the portal. Any new features or changes will be noted in the wiki article on the subject. You can also follow R1Soft on Twitter for the latest.

We thank you for your patience during the launch period!!

HostingCon 2011 may have come and gone (*tear*), but we have one last piece of business to take care of – picking our NOOK Color giveaway winner! We got to connect with a lot of great folks in San Diego, but there’s only one NOOK to award this go-around. the lucky winner of our 2011 HostingCon giveaway is….drumroll, please… Rick Lingsch of eApps! Congrats, Rick!

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by our booth. We look forward to seeing you all next year!

Today’s Quick Tip focuses on the steps involved in restoring Windows Dynamic and Logical disks in CDP 3 Enterprise and Advanced Editions.

There are 6 key steps to restore Windows Logical and Dynamic disks in CDP 3:

Restoring Windows Logical Disks: Learn More

Restoring Windows Dynamic Disks: Learn More

Today’s tip focuses on exporting files from a recovery point in CDP 3.0. This option is available with CDP release 3.12 and forward.

Beginning with CDP release 3.12 and forward, you can download a zip or tar archive file containing your Recovery Point data. After downloading the archive file, you can extract files or store the archives for future use.

Here are the steps to export files from a Recovery Point:

1) Login to the CDP Web interface and select Recovery Points from the main menu.

2) Select the relevant Disk Safe from the Recovery Point list toolbar.
> Enterprise Edition users will need to select the relevant Agent and then the disk safe.
> Advanced and Standard Edition users just need to select the disk safe.

3) Select the Browse option next to the Recovery Point of interest.

4) Check the boxes next to the files and folders you want to export within an archive.

5) Using the “Download Stored Files” wizard, proceed with your download. You can specify zip, tar, tar compression with gzip, and filename as part of the process.

Review the directions, including step-by-step screenshots and commands, in our wiki.

Have questions about this Quick Tip or any of our high-performance CDP backup products? Connect with us on Twitter: R1Soft

Today’s tip offers a best practice for utilizing hosting control panel restore for CDP 3.0 Enterprise and Advanced Editions.

A common question from many of our customers is how to selectively restrict certain customers’ access to backups via control panel integration. With CDP 3.0 there are two ways to do so:

1. In Quick Tip #14, we discussed how to generate a user-specific URL for customers to access their backups.  In this case, ONLY give out this CDP Server login URL to hosting accounts that are premium or have paid for restore access (or whatever other criterion you decide on).

2. A more robust way to lock out specific users is to modify open source Perl scripts (cPanel and Plesk) to check whether the user account is in a list or database of allowed accounts.

CDP Server Backup: Learn more about how to lock out specific users from hosting control panel restore via scripting with CDP 3.0.

Today’s tip focuses on hosting control panel restore for CDP 3.0 Enterprise and Advanced Editions, available in the latest CDP release.

As a service provider, you may want to give control panel customers access to their CDP backups to allow them to perform their own restores or download archived files.

Giving a customer access is as simple as retrieving the customer’s unique access URL, which is generated by the system when the customer’s control panel instance is added. Our suggestion is to provide this information to the customer in a welcome email.

A few notes on the hosting control panel URL:

• The URL is a special URL for each cPanel, Plesk, or Virtuozzo server and knows which server the customer is on and in which Disk Safe his backups can be found. (Get directions)
• The URL is automatically created by the CDP Server when you add the customer’s control panel instance.
• After clicking on the URL, the customer will be asked for his cPanel, Plesk, or Virtuozzo username and password.
• The customer can automatically restore his own files or download them to his PC.
  (*The user can only see files in his own hosting account.)

Server Backup: Learn more about retrieving your customer’s URL to allow him to restore or download files.

Connect with us on Twitter: R1Soft

Today’s tip focuses on recovery point archiving for CDP 3.0 Enterprise and Advanced Editions, available in the latest CDP release.

In addition to your regular backup schedules, your company may need to archive data at certain intervals for internal and/or regulatory requirements.  For example, you may need to archive on a monthly basis.

The recovery point archiving feature in CDP 3.0 Enterprise and Advanced Editions offers an easy solution to create archives of your data on a specified hour, day, week, or month.

Archive points are essentially recovery points that can be used for long term data storage to provide integrity and safe-keeping of data according to specified schedules. You have the flexibility to set up the date, time, and number of archive points. For example, you could set up a schedule so that archive points are created at the end of your day, on the last day of the month, for 24 straight months (when you exceed the specified number of archive points, old archive points will be replaced by new ones).

In addition to setting up and creating archives per your specified schedule, you can also browse and restore files/folders within archives and perform Bare-Metal Restore on archive points.

Learn more about recovery point archiving in CDP 3.0.

New and Improved Product Release – CDP 3.10

Hey, CDP fans. Good news at R1Soft this week: hosting control panel restore and recovery point archiving are now available for CDP Enterprise and Advanced Editions. To get the full scoop on all of the updates available in the 3.10 release, check out the release notes. Herewith, the major highlights:

Hosting Control Panel Restore

Hosting control panel end-users can log in directly to the R1Soft CDP 3.0 Web interface using their own control panel site/ftp user credentials. End-users are able to restore zip or tar files of all their data.

This release of CDP 3.0 features hosting control panel restore for:

• cPanel (Linux)
• Plesk (Linux)
• Virtuozzo containers (Linux)
• cPanel or Plesk in Virtuozzo containers

Coming soon for hosting control panel restore:

• Ensim
• DirectAdmin
• Interworx
• cPanel Plugin (provides link to CDP Enterprise User Interface for cPanel users)

Recovery Point Archiving

In addition to your regular hourly replications with CDP, backups, corporate and regulatory requirements often require the archiving of data at certain intervals (for example, weekly or monthly). CDP 3.0 now allows you to define an archiving policy for your recovery points to ensure your retention requirements are supported. Administrators can set up recovery point archiving for a particular policy to archive on the specified hour, day, week or month; for example, you could set up an end-of-year archive.

Learn more about hosting control panel restore and the latest release CDP 3.0.

What is a Volume?

A Volume in CDP 3.0 is simply a “home” directory for your customer’s Disk Safe(s). A Volume allows you to control where on disk your customers Disk Safes are located and hides the actual storage path from your customer. You can also put a quota on a Volume to control how much Disk Space your customer can use.

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Congrats to our newest giveaway winner, Dean Carrera of Sozo Hosting. Dean is the proud new owner of a Nook Color, courtesy of R1Soft. A big THANK YOU to all of the great folks who came out to see us at the Parallels Summit and everyone who attended a recent webinar.

But our giveaways don’t end there. The R1Soft team will be making an appearance at a number of upcoming trade shows. If you will also be attending any of these fun events, stop by our booth to say hi! (Don’t forget to bring your business card for a chance to enter our drawing).

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