BeBackup version 7 is available. Rather than a list of features, here is what it changes in the daily life of a service company — and the decisions it lets you take differently.
You can finally say yes on Microsoft 365
This is the request every provider receives and which, until now, had to be answered with a second tool, a second contract and a second console.
BeBackup 7 backs up mailboxes, contacts, calendars, To Do tasks, OneDrive, sites, SharePoint libraries and lists, directly from the server through the Microsoft Graph API. Nothing is installed on the workstations, and provisioning the Azure application is done from the interface.
What matters for day-to-day operation: the content lands in an ordinary BeBackup store. It therefore inherits versions, deduplication, encryption, fingerprint-based integrity checking, tiered retention and off-site replication. You are not running a second product.
And the restore is granular: search for a message in the body text, preview it with its attachments, put it back in its original mailbox, in another mailbox, or in a SharePoint library. That is the difference between "we have a backup" and "I will have that email back for you in two minutes".
The whole estate, not just the Windows machines
Five platforms join the solution, with the same backup engine as Windows:
- macOS, as a signed and notarised package, with APFS snapshots for consistency.
- Linux Debian and Ubuntu, systemd service, LVM and btrfs snapshots.
- Synology DSM 7, x86_64 and ARM packages, with a page integrated into the DSM desktop.
- Android and iPhone, for the photos, videos and files on phones — in the background, to your own server.
Platforms with no local interface are driven entirely from the server's web interface.
The commercial effect is direct: the designer's Mac, the Linux server running the line-of-business application, the NAS where the essentials always end up accumulating, and the sales team's phones stop being exceptions to explain in a meeting. The scope becomes "everything", and so does the contract.
A system backup you can pull a single file out of
BeBackup SmartImage® reads NTFS partitions file by file with BeBackup's own NTFS engine, and the rest of the disk as an image.
Two consequences, and it is the second one you measure:
- The system backup remains restorable to bare metal, but you can also extract a single file from it. No more choosing between an opaque image and a file backup unable to bring a system back.
- It only carries the changed files instead of comparing disk blocks. The system backup stops being a heavy weekly operation.
A partition with no drive letter — a mount point, a system partition — is supported, and the partition table is kept with the disk, including the chaining of logical partitions.
Getting going again without waiting for hardware
P2V and V2V restore puts a physical or virtual machine back onto the disks of a VMware ESXi VM: disk-by-disk mapping, automatic stop and start of the VM, creation of an empty VM from the interface.
This is the answer to the most mundane scenario in a small business: the server died on a Friday, the replacement arrives on Tuesday, and the business cannot wait. If you have an ESXi host with spare resources, the server comes back up there until the hardware arrives.
Deduplication across clients
Across an estate, the same blocks come back constantly from one client to another: operating systems, office suites, identical line-of-business software.
The deduplication accelerator promotes these frequent blocks into a shared store on SSD, shared between the stores of different clients. Confidentiality is handled head-on: the store is organised into sets, each carrying its own encryption key, its occurrence threshold and its minimum size. Nothing sits in the clear on the SSD, and a set can be exported and replicated to other servers, key included.
The volume saved is measured per store and appears in the backup report — not an average percentage, the figure for your own estate.
Knowing what you are about to lose before you lose it
Tiered retention complements the rolling history: a minimum number of versions, the last backup of the day, of the week, of the month, of the year.
But the feature that really changes habits is the simulation. Before applying a rule, the server shows what would be kept and what would be deleted, backup by backup, with the reason. You adjust a rule while watching it apply, instead of discovering it while looking for a version that no longer exists.
Security brought back to the expected level
Three points that your clients — or their auditor — will end up asking you about:
- TLS 1.3 between agents and server, on a signed OpenSSL 3.5, with a TLS 1.2 floor for browsers. Neither TLS nor packet encryption can be switched off by configuration.
- TOTP two-factor authentication, compatible with Google Authenticator, with a QR code generated by the server. And device enrolment: a connection from an unknown device triggers a code and an email stating the IP address and the browser.
- Let's Encrypt certificates issued from the interface through ACME v2, then renewed automatically thirty days before expiry. Let's Encrypt, Buypass, ZeroSSL or a custom authority.
That last point removes an operational classic: the certificate that expires on a Sunday morning.
What has not moved
The principles remain those of 2012, and the new features fit within them rather than going round them:
- AES-256 encryption takes place on the workstation, with a key that never travels over the network. The server holds nothing but its fingerprint.
- You choose where the server is hosted: on your premises, at your client's, or on a dedicated server. Nothing is imposed on you.
- A single console for all your clients, white labelled, with permissions per technician.
- Development, hosting and support in France.
Where to start
If you already use BeBackup, the two new features that pay off fastest are Microsoft 365 — because the demand already exists among your clients and it can be invoiced — and the Mac, Linux and NAS agents, because they remove the exceptions from your contracts.
If you are discovering the solution, the best evaluation remains a system backup followed by a timed restore on your own infrastructure.
See the detail of what is new in version 7 or ask for a thirty-minute demo on your own real use cases.