N-able announces the expansion of the Backup for Microsoft 365 solution to its entire partner ecosystem. To date more than 4,000 N-able partners chose to use the solution to help prevent data loss on more than 25,000 customer domains and over 900,000 Exchange mailboxes.
N-able Backup for Microsoft 365 is designed to help IT service providers protect Microsoft 365 users from data loss. The solution allows customers to retain and restore data from Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint. All using a single web-based dashboard to protect servers, workstations and critical business documents. Note that backups are fully automated and performed several times a day.
With N-able Backup for Microsoft 365 your data is always safe
Oddly enough, many businesses rely on a SaaS vendor, like Microsoft, for their backup and protection services despite explicit warnings that those services don’t include backups.
A May report from the Enterprise Strategy Group, “The Evolution of Data Protection Cloud Strategies,” indicated that a third of respondents do not believe that backup is necessary. This is despite the fact that 33% of people involved in the report reported losing data residing in the cloud, an increase from 2020 (18%). There are many ways to lose data, including accidental or malicious deletion, malware or ransomware, and service failure.
“Over the past two years, we have seen a dramatic shift in market awareness of the need for SaaS backup, and Microsoft 365 backup in particular,” said Chris Groot, general manager of N-able Backup. “Customers and prospects have gone from considering backup for Microsoft 365 as optional to necessary. No longer are they wondering if they should back up their SaaS workloads, now the focus is on choosing the vendor that best fits their needs. An integrated user experience that combines all Microsoft 365 data protection workloads, servers and workstations into a single view, has proven to be a major differentiator from the overwhelming array of solutions available for the SaaS backups”.
N-able Backup for Microsoft 365 is designed to help customers:
– Quickly recover data in case of emergency and keep it longer
– Reduce service delivery costs by managing Microsoft 365 data backup and recovery from the same dashboard used to protect critical business documents, workstations and servers
– Generate profitability through a fixed fee per user (data storage in the cloud is included in the price)
Nextcloud is truly the software of the future. With it, it’s easier than ever to set up your own easy-to-use storage solution, similar to Dropbox on Linux. Setting up the software is extremely easy thanks to things like Snap packages. However, it is not that easy to back up a NextCloud Snap installation.
Note: Before backing up to Nextcloud, make sure that all of your files have finished syncing. During the backup process, the NextCloud plugin will shut down, suspending all services for all users connected to it.
stop the server
Creating a Nextcloud backup, especially the Snap version, requires suspending the server software. Without shutting down the Nextcloud server, some files may not be saved, permission errors may occur, and even data may be lost.
Fortunately, suspending a running Nextcloud server is as easy as installing it. To stop the server, open a terminal and get to a root shell using su or sudo -s. Then use the snap stop command to stop all Nextcloud services.
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sudo -s snap stop nextcloud
Running the quick stop command will disable the SQL database and other running Nextcloud services. It won’t uninstall them, so don’t worry! Your files are safe!
backup folders
With the server temporarily down, it is safe to create a Nextcloud backup. However, before the server-side backup can begin, we recommend creating a backup of the ~/Nextcloud folder for each user. This way, if something happens to the server backup, users will still have a duplicate of their data.
To create a backup of a Nextcloud sync folder, go to any Linux PC using the sync server and open a terminal. In the terminal, use the tar command to create an archive of the ~/Nextcloud folder. Be sure to replace “username” in the following command with your username.
tar -zcvpf nextcloud-local-backup-username.tar.gz ~/Nexcloud
Depending on the size of ~/Nextcloud, the compression process may take a while. When the archiving process is complete, use the GPG command to encrypt the file (for security purposes).
GnuPG will generate nextcloud-local-backup-username.tar.gz.gpg.
After GPG finishes the encryption process, place the encrypted backup in a safe place.
Nextcloud Backup
Backing up the Snap version of Nextcloud is by far the easiest, compared to the traditional Nextcloud setup. Since it’s all in the Nextcloud Snap folder, there’s no need to export any SQL databases or mess with individual files. Instead, users can create a full Nextcloud backup by backing up two individual folders.
The first folder to back up within the Nextcloud Snap directory is the configuration directory. To determine the name of the Nextcloud configuration folder, run lsblk and see where it is on the system. As of writing this article, the mount folder is:
/var/lib/snapd/snap/nextcloud/7658
Create a new backup folder inside /home/username/ with the mkdir command and use the cp command to copy everything into it.
Now that the backup is complete, it is safe to compress the backup into a Tar file for safekeeping. In the terminal, compress the data into a TarGZ file, using the tar command.
Note: Before you compress this backup, make sure you have enough disk space to support it.
tar -zcvpf nextcloud-snap-server-backup.tar.gz ~/nextcloud-server-backup
Depending on how much data is on Nextcloud, this could take a while. When the compression is complete, feel free to move the backup to an external hard drive or backup file server.
encrypt backup
The Nextcloud server has a backup, but it is not secure because it is not encrypted. To make sure the data on your Nextcloud server is safe from eavesdropping, encrypt it with GnuPG.
To encrypt the backup, open a terminal and run the following command:
gpg -c nextcloud-snap-server-backup.tar.gz
Like Nextcloud’s local backup, GPG will generate a nextcloud-snap-server-backup.tar.gz.gpg file. This file is encrypted and safe, so it’s okay to delete the unencrypted file:
rm nextcloud-snap-server-backup.tar.gz
restore backup
Do you need to restore the backup? Start by moving nextcloud-snap-server-backup.tar.gz.gpg to /home/username/.
Then decrypt the file with gpg:
gpg nextcloud-snap-server-backup.tar.gz.gpg
Extract the file with tar.
tar -xvpf nextcloud-snap-server-backup.tar.gz
Please reinstall before attempting to restore the backup (if you are on a new system).
Love Plasma 5 and want to back up your configuration files just in case? If so, you’ll need to do some digging in your home directory, as the configuration files for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop belong in the ~/.config/ folder. That being said, KDE does not save all of its settings in one folder. Instead, they are scattered all over the place in the ~/.config folder. It is possible to back up KDE Plasma 5 by saving the entire configuration folder, but this is not something we recommend. The hidden configuration area in most Linux distributions is large. Compressing it would take too long.
KDE Connect Backup
Instead, it’s better to classify and copy all KDE items. Let’s start by backing up one of the key features of the KDE Plasma desktop: KDE Connect. Keeping a backup of KDE Connect really helps, as it’s a hassle to set everything up again.
Start by using CD to move to ~/.config
cd ~/.config
Copy the KDE connection folder to a new Plasma backup folder.
mkdir ~/plasma-backups cp -R kdeconnect
Alternatively, feel free to create a separate file of the same:
tar -jcvf kdeconnect-backup.tar.bz2 kdeconnect
Next, review and create a backup of all files related to “k”. This will include things like “kwin” and “kscreenlocker” etc.
Most of the files have been backed up. Note that you can have more items, so use the ls command and browse to any other widget folder you want to save. Move them with the mv command to ~/plasma-backups.
KDE Plasma Backup
Now that many of plasma’s non-KDE related files have been safely backed up to the ~/plasma-backups folder, we can move the main Plasma backup items to the backup folder created earlier.
mv plasma* ~/plasma-backups
Everything related to the KDE Plasma desktop environment should be inside ~/plasma-backups. At last, we can create the tar file backup of everything. Start by moving the terminal from ~/.config to the home folder.
cd ~/
Then use the tar command to create a new backup of the file.
tar -jcvf plasma-backups plasma-backups.tar.bz2
Each file inside the ~/plasma-backups folder is now compressed into one archive. Feel free to take this folder and upload it to Dropbox, Google Drive, home servers, etc.
Restoring the backup
Do you need to restore the backup to a new installation? Begin by downloading your plasma-backups.tar.bz2 archive file. Move it out of the folder where you downloaded it and place it in ~/.config/ For example:
cd ~/Downloads mv plasma-backups.tar.bz2 ~/.config/
From here, you will be able to extract the contents of the file backup.
tar -xvf plasma-backups.tar.bz2 cd plasma-backups mv * .. rmdir plasma-backups rm plasma-backups.tar.bz2
Everything should go exactly where it is needed.
When the restore is complete, log out of KDE and then log back in. Everything should be like when you created the backups!
KDE Plasma 5 Automated Backups – Deja-Dup
There are many ways to create file backups on Linux, but Deja Dup is one of the best. If you are an avid KDE Plasma 5 user and want to keep track of your KDE Plasma configuration files at all times, you might want to consider using Deja Dup for backups.
The advantage of going this route is that Deja Dup can back up via multiple interfaces such as local network shares (Samba, FTP), directly to various online storage sites, or even locally. Another advantage of using Deja Dup is that it is possible to tell the backup tool what to exclude.
Here’s how to set up an automated backup of your KDE Plasma settings. First, follow the installation process in our guide here. Then, open Deja Dup and select “folders to ignore”. Click the + sign and navigate to the ~/.config folder.
Add any folders that do not belong to KDE Plasma 5. Excluding these files should drastically reduce the size of your backup file.
Note: Deja Dup currently does not support file-by-file filtering, so some other non-KDE files may be backed up, depending on what is installed.
Then go back to the main page and select “Save Folders”. Click + and add ~/.config as the main backup folder.
Now that the correct folders are ready to go, click on “Schedule” and click the slider next to “automatic backup”.
Go to “Overview” in the Deja Dup backup tool and click “Backup” to create your first backup. From now on, all KDE Plasma desktop configurations will be done automatically.
Restoring the backup
Restoring backups for KDE Plasma in Deja Dup is quite easy and starts with opening Deja Dup and clicking “storage location”. In the location box, fill in the network details correctly so Deja Dup can find everything.
With the correct location set, click on “Summary” and then select the “Restore” button. If Deja Dup successfully finds the storage location, the restore can begin. When Deja Dup finishes, restart your PC. Upon login, everything should be back to normal.
