The Nexenta Delorean: ZFS powered backup for Windows
Nexenta Delorean keeps an up-to-date copy of your Windows server, desktop or laptop, and provides for multi-level data protection, backup/restore to and from NexentaStor ZFS based storage, unlimited snapshots, and built-in File Explorer to view all previously saved copies (snapshots) of your files. Please see section Features below, for detailed description and screenshots.
Requirements
- Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Windows Server 2003/2008
- Free Trial Edition or Enterprise Edition version 2.0 or later.
Download
Nexenta Delorean is a native Windows GUI client application that can be installed on virtually any existing Windows platform (see previous section for the exact list of supported platforms). NexentaStor itself is available as a CD image that can be installed on a "bare-metal" x86/64 hardware platform, or as a guest OS into a VMware or Xen based Virtual Machine (the corresponding requirements are listed elsewhere on this website). Please make sure to check the appliance's version: Delorean requires version 2.0 or later.
Download via HTTP:
 Download Nexenta Delorean | ||||||||||
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Getting Started:
- Download the Delorean zipped installation program (the download link above). You can optionally check MD5 of the downloaded zipped file.
- Unzip and run the installation program.
- Authenticate Delorean to the appliance by entering a pre-configured password. The password is setup on each appliance using NMC command 'setup delorean password', or the corresponding NMV (web GUI) page. NexentaStor Delorean plugin, available now for Free Trial and Enterprise editions, provides authentication for Delorean clients and runs within (and as part of) NexentaStor. In the near future this extension module will provide a variety of management policies (compression, encryption, quotas, etc.) set up on the appliance itself by system administrators.
- Select a data volume on this appliance. This volume will then be used for your Windows backups. Note that you can add or remove NexentaStor appliances at any later time. There is no limitation, in terms of how many appliances Delorean uses for backup, and which data volumes are used on those appliances.
- Select a root backup folder on this volume.
- Optionally, specify your CIFS user name and password. If specified, the backed up files and folders on the appliance will have the corresponding ownership. For information on user management and CIFS identity mapping, please see NexentaStor User Guide and F.A.Q. pages.
- Upon installation, review Delorean README for the most recent information and release notes.
- Register your Delorean instance with sales at nexenta dot com.
Delorean is a high-powered Windows Backup, Restore and Search tool, with multiple advanced capabilities.
The features at-a-glance include: support for Windows VSS, combined backup + snapshot capability, support for any backup schedule, ability to work with any number of NexentaStor appliances on the backend, as well as any number of independently scheduled and independently configured backup services (each having its own retention policy, its own schedule, and transport mechanism). Delorean provides built-in File Explorer and preservers Windows ACLs.
With Delorean you can extend the power of NexentaStor right to your end users' computers, ensuring that your company's data residing on client machines, as well as servers, is protected.
Many of the Delorean capabilities are reflected in its built-in Wizard designed to simplify initial setup/configuration for the first-time Delorean users.
The rest of this section describes Delorean functionality in greater detail.
Volume Shadow Copy Service for Windows (VSS)
VSS allows for creation of consistent backups; it ensures that the source content does not change while the backup is being made. When using VSS, Delorean is capable of accessing every source file (including system and hidden) without interfering with running applications that may be accessing (and possibly writing) those files concurrently.
Combined backups + snapshot
You can periodically backup a given Windows drive or a directory and generate a ZFS snapshot every time the backup has run. You can control the number of saved (retained) snapshots, and view/restore your data from older snapshots.
Integrated search in history of your backups
Delorean uses NexentaStor built-in search engine to search through your backups. You can set a specific date, or a time interval (from-date, to-date), along with one or more search keywords, or an arbitrary logical expression based on those keywords.
NexentaStor search engine features:
• Phrase and proximity searching
• Full range of structured boolean search operators
• Unicode
• Ranked probabilistic search
• Relevance feedback
• Stemming of search terms
• Wildcard search is supported (e.g. "nexen*")
• Synonyms are supported
• Suggest spelling corrections for user supplied queries
• Supports database files > 2GB
Following is a quick demonstration of the power of Delorean search:
- Searching through all backups for the exact phrase:
- Searching the latest backup for any of the specified keywords:
- Searching all specified keywords in the backups performed during a given time interval:
- Selecting the dates to search based on the dates of the backups:
Please note:
There are two basic things to keep in mind, as far as Delorean search is concerned.
- To facilitate the search, NexentaStor appliance performs periodic scheduled indexing of all backed up folders and their ZFS snapshots. Once indexing is done, the search itself takes almost no time.
- Note that Delorean can search only if the corresponding data was already indexed. The capability to search not-yet indexed data will be added in the future.
Searching not-yet-indexed data results in:
Any schedule
You can schedule your backups to run every minute, every hour at a given minute of the hour, every few hours, every day at a certain time, bi-weekly at a given day/time, and so on. And because they are ZFS snapshots only changes will be saved and transmitted over the wire.
Multiple backup destinations and backup services
Delorean supports multiple appliances as backup destinations, and multiple backup services per NexentaStor appliance.
Each backup service independently defines what to backup, when to backup, and how to backup. Each service is scheduled automatically and implements its own configured retention policy (ie, how many snapshots to keep at the destination).
File Explorer
Delorean provides built-in two-panel File Explorer, with the left-hand pane displaying your local files, and the right-hand pane showing remote files and snapshots stored on the appliance. You can easily view previous copies of your files by “zooming in” any of the retained snapshots. Delorean File Explorer uses CIFS to access the remote destination.
Delorean is tightly integrated with the appliance over Storage Appliance API (SA-API)
SA-API provides language bindings for C, C++, Perl, Python and Ruby. This comprehensive documented and published API provides access to all appliance’s services and is used to manage all aspects of the appliance operation.
Multiple backup transports
Delorean is designed from ground up to use a variety of transports. Delorean currently supports 3 backup transports: Rsync, Rsync over CIFS, Robocopy.
Rsync (http://www.samba.org/rsync ) has been in the open source development for at least the last 13+ years by now, and is the most popular, stable, fast, incremental (transferring only file differences) backup mechanism.
Rsync over CIFS has the advantage of running "locally", with respect to a given Windows Intranet environment, which may have implications both in terms of security and seamless mapping between Windows and Unix user identities.
Finally, Robocopy or "Robust File Copy" is designed for reliable mirroring of directories or directory trees. It has features to ensure that all NTFS attributes and properties are replicated. Robocopy includes additional restart code for network connections subject to disruption. Robocopy is available as part of the Windows Resource Kit, and introduced as a standard feature of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
Windows ACL
Delorean stores Windows Access Control Lists associated with the files and directories that are being backed up. Delorean will also restore the corresponding ACL entries for each restored object. This (ability to preserve ACLs) makes Delorean particularly suitable as a backup solution for Windows servers, and more generally, any environment that employs discretionary access control lists (DACLs) and system access control lists (SACLs) for protected resources such as files and folders.
CPU utilization(1)
Delorean can be configured to limit the usage of the CPU resources and run at the desired Windows process priority.
Priority determines how much the service will use the resources of the CPU, relatively to other services, processes and programs that currently running on system. The OS supported process priorities are:
- Low – replication service will try to use the resources of the CPU which is not used by other services, processes and programs.
- Normal – CPU resource usage will be on an equal with other tasks.
- High – In this case, the replication service will attempt to use the largest amount of CPU resources.
To make backups "invisible", as far as the overall productivity of your Windows computer, simply select a 'low' priority. Conversely, to minimize the time of the replication, set Delorean priority to 'high'.
Bandwidth limitation (throttling)
Delorean, or more exactly the underlying replication transport it uses, can be configured to limit (throttle) network and I/O bandwidth. The coresponding field is titled "Enable bandwidth limit" on the screenshot above.
Working as service (Service Mode)
Delorean can work as Windows service. This allows do backups without depending of logged user or not.
Delorean provides enterprise grade powerful capabilites (listed above). To help you get started, we have developed Delorean Wizard. The Wizar's Welcome screen:
The Wizard will guide you through a simple sequence of steps, to quickly setup your Windows backups, specify schedule and snapshot retention policies.
- Step 1. Selecting target appliance
- Step 2. Selecting target destination folder
- Step 3. Setting up backup schedule
- Step 4. Selecting backup transport
- Step 5. Replicating extended Windows ACLs
- Step 6. VSS and snapshot retention policy
- Step 7. CPU utilization by the backups
- Step 8. Exclude patterns
- Step 9. Comments
- Step 10. Summary
F.A.Q.
Question: Delorean Explorer allows me to see what I backed up but I can't open the files.
Answer: User logins used by Delorean for a backup and for mapping CIFS folder may differ.
User account that is used for all file operations in Delorean is set during an installation procedure. Delorean offers two choices:
(a) use default user (login is 'delorean')
(b) create new user account, with new login and password
Be careful when choosing to create new account. If the selected login is already registered on the NexentaStor, you must use the password assoicated with that user account. If account does not yet exist, make sure that the password is strong enough - otherwise NexentaStor will not accept this password and Delorean will not be able to operate with NexentaStor.
There are two basic ways to open the backed up files remotely, on the appliance:
- Map the CIFS folder using the Delorean default user account ('delorean')
- Change default built-in user used by Delorean for all operations. To do it, you will need to re-install Delorean. Do NOT remove it's configuration files. Prior to the first Delorean run, the owner of the previously backed up data have to be changed to the new selected user, assuming full access to the old backups is needed. Otherwise, early backed up files cannot be opened or changed.
Note that you can always restore your files and folders from the appliance (or more exactly - from any snapshot that resides on the appliance), and access those files and folders locally on your Windows machine.
