Category: Documentation

Add and Rename Storage Vaults

Adding new Storage Vault

New storage vaults can be created through eazyBackup and from the online Control Panel.

Adding Vaults using the eazybackup application:

  • Open the application interface
  • Select the menu icon
  • Click Settings
  • On the 'Storage Vaults' tab click the '+' button to add a new vault
  • You can add an eazyBackup cloud vault or choose custom to select from other local storage and cloud storage options

Adding Vaults using the online Control Panel:

  • Browse to https://panel.eazybackup.ca/
  • Enter you account username / password to login
  • Select 'Storage Vaults' from the navigation menu
  • Click the 'Add new vault' button
  • You can add an eazyBackup cloud vault or choose custom to select from other local storage and cloud storage options

Rename Storage Vaults

Rename Vaults using the eazybackup application:

  • Open the application interface
  • Select the menu icon
  • Click Settings
  • Select the Storage Vault to rename and select the pencil icon to edit.
  • Enter a new name for the Vault on the General tab and then click save

Rename Vaults using the Control Panel:

  • Browse to https://panel.eazybackup.ca/
  • Enter you account username / password to login
  • Select 'Storage Vaults' from the navigation menu
  • Click the name of the Vault you want to edit
  • Enter a new name for the Vault in the 'Name' field on the 'General' tab, click Save.

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How to run manual backup

Data should be backed up automatically on schedule as per the schedule setting.

At times, you may wish to immediately start a backup job, or back up to a different Storage Vault. You can back up any Protected Item to any Storage Vault by following these steps:

  1. Click on a Protected Item, and click the Backup Now button
  2. Step through the wizard to select a destination Storage Vault
  3. The backup job will start within the main window interface

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Browse job history

Click the "History" button at the top of the

Filter

Click the "Filter" icon to toggle displaying the Filter pane. The Filter pane allows you to filter the displayed jobs by status, classification, Protected Item, Storage Vault, and device.

When the filter bar is closed, the data area shows all jobs from the current device. You can use the filter bar to show historic jobs from other devices in the account.

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Deleting a Protected Item

You can delete a Protected Item from the client user interface. Open eazyBackup, select the "Backup" tab, right click on the Protected Item and choose "Delete". Confirm you want to delete the Protected Item.

Removing a protected item does not immediately delete customer data. Data from a deleted Protected Item will remain safe in your storage vault until the retention policy on the storage vault has expired.

Delete protected Item

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Error “Access to the cloud file is denied” backing up OneDrive

To save on disk space, OneDrive (and some other cloud storage providers) use a system where some files are only "virtually" stored on the local disk, and are materialized from the cloud storage on-demand.

If you encounter the "Access to the cloud file is denied" error message, this means that file in question does not exist on the local PC, and the OneDrive virtual filesystem driver is refusing to download this file on-demand for eazyBackup to read it.

At the time of writing, the only available workaround is to disable the "Files-On-Demand" feature in OneDrive. However, this may cause an unacceptable increase in local disk usage for some customers.

To disable the "Files-On-Demand" feature in OneDrive:

  1. Right-click OneDrive in the System Tray
  2. Click the menu icon -> Settings -> Sync and backup -> "Files-On-Demand" section -> Click "Download all files", Click Continue

 

OneDrive The cloud operation is not supported on a read-only volume

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Backing up Windows network shares and UNC paths 

eazyBackup can back up Windows network paths and can also back up to Windows network storage (SMB / CIFS). However, because eazyBackup runs as a service user, there are some issues with authentication to be aware of.

Please note that if you are using eazyBackup to back up data from a network device, ideally you should install eazyBackup directly on the device instead of backing it up over the network. This will also significantly improve performance as less data needs to be transferred over the LAN.

Mapped network drives 

On Windows, each logged-on user session has its own set of mapped network drives. The service user account is unlikely to have any mapped drives. If you see error messages such as "WARNING Missing: 'Z:\'", this is likely due to the lack of mapped drives. You can work around this by using a UNC path instead.

You can also do this manually:

  • In eazyBackup, when choosing items in a Files and Folders Protected Item, you can use the "Options" button > "Add " to browse inside a UNC path. Note that this browsing occurs as your logged-in Windows user, not as the service user, and may have different file access as a result. All backup jobs run as the service user.

Authentication 

If the UNC share requires authentication and you see error messages such as "WARNING Lstat: CreateFile \\?\UNC\...: Access is denied", the reason is likely that the service user account is probably not logged-in to the UNC share.

Edit the Protected Item, from the "Items" tab click the down arrow next to the "+" button.

 

Select the "Log in to network share" option from the menu to add your share credentials.

 

Add the path to your network share, and add network share username and password as shown in example below.

 

You can also work around this issue in eazyBackup by changing the Windows Service to use a different user account.

  • Change service user on the eazyBackup (delegate service) service.
  • If you are using eazyBackup on a Windows Server machine that is acting as the Domain Controller, you must choose a domain account.

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Confirm EFS keys are exported (Windows EFS)

EFS is a Windows feature that allows you to encrypt individual files on disk. eazyBackup supports backing up EFS-encrypted files on Windows. The files will be silently decrypted if possible (e.g. if eazyBackup Backup is running as the encryption user, or if eazyBackup Backup is running as the EFS Recovery Agent user).

If it is not possible to automatically decrypt the file for backup, eazyBackup will back up the file in its encrypted form, and will only be able to restore it in its encrypted form. EFS-encrypted files are displayed with green text in the Restore browser dialog in eazyBackup.

If you have a PC failure, the EFS encryption keys may be lost. In this situation, the EFS-encrypted files may be unusable, even after restoring from backup. eazyBackup warns you about this situation by adding a warning message in the backup job log.

In order to safely prepare for this scenario, you should export the PC's EFS encryption keys, so that the files can be accessed after a PC failure. On Windows, you can do this via certmgr.msc; or on Windows Server, taking a System State backup may be sufficient.

Once you have safely backed up the PC's EFS encryption keys, you can suppress the warning in eazyBackup by enabling the "I confirm EFS keys are exported" option in the Protected Item settings.

If you have only a partial PC failure (e.g. files lost, but OS installation and user accounts remain intact), the EFS-encrypted files will be restorable without any further attention to the EFS keys.

Finding files using EFS:

You can use the cipher /u /n command to list all files on the local PC that are EFS-encrypted.

Finding the certificate used to encrypt a file:

You can use the cipher /C C:\path\to\file.txt command to display the user accounts and certificates that are able to decrypt a file. This may indicate which user originally encrypted the file and/or which EFS certificates are necessary for backup.

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Re-scan unchanged files

In a regular "Files and Folders" backup, eazyBackup will skip over files that have the same file size and modification time as the last backup job. If these properties are the same, eazyBackup will refer to previous chunks and not re-chunk the file. This dramatically improves performance.

If you are working with certain types of files that change content without updating their modification time attribute on the filesystem - for instance, applications that use direct disk I/O instead of filesystem functions; some database data files; or VeraCrypt container files - then the above is obviously unsatisfactory for ensuring backup integrity. In this case, you can enable the "Rescan unchanged files" feature to cause eazyBackup to chunk every encountered file. This has some performance penalty but does ensure backup integrity in the presence of such files.

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Data encryption

We strongly recommend that customers create and use strong passwords. Even the best security is foiled by a user choosing a weak or commonly-used password, such as 123456 or password.

eazyBackup always encrypts all user data before storing it, using strong AES-256-CTR with Poly1305 in AEAD mode with high-entropy random keys.

Encryption is enabled by default and cannot be disabled.

Encryption keys for your data are automatically generated and managed by the eazyBackup app. The data encryption keys are then encrypted against your backup account password, and stored on the Server.

This means that (A) eazyBackup is unable to decrypt data without the customer's password; and (B) in the event of a customer PC loss, only the customer's password is necessary to log in to the account and restore data.

eazyBackup

eazyBackup Chunking and Deduplication

eazyBackup starts by first splitting data into variable-sized chunks, which are individually compressed, encrypted, and uploaded. eazyBackup uses data-dependent chunking, efficiently splitting a file into consistent chunks even in the face of random inserts.

A backup job consists of a list of files and which chunks would be needed to reconstruct them. Any successive incremental backup jobs simply realize that chunks already exist on the server and do not need to be re-uploaded.

This chunking technique has the following properties:

  • Both the oldest and the most recent backup jobs can be restored with the same speed
  • Duplicate data does not require any additional storage, since the chunks are the same ("deduplication")
  • There is never any need to re-upload the full file, regardless of the number of backup jobs
  • There is no need for the server to be trusted to decrypt data

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