The Nexenta Delorean: ZFS powered backup for Windows
Overview
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.
This article is broken down into the following sections:
- Planning
- Download
- Installation
- Configuration
- Search Tutorial
- Installation FAQ
For detailed introduction and features, please refer to Applications - Nexenta Delorean page on this site.
What's New
- service mode, to run backups in the background, without having logged in user
- event notifications on any Delorean related events including failed backups; event verbosity and levels from 'informational' to 'error'. Note: requires appliance's mailer to be set up - see NexentaStor User Guide.
- VSS support for 64-bit Windows platforms (Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server)
- independent backup services: per backup service destination folder (filesystem)
- improved support for multiple simultaneous backups
- fixed setting up snapshot retention policy (keep so-many days), to comply with the NexentaStor 3.x
Planning
Nexenta Delorean requires:
- Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Windows Server 2003/2008
- NexentaStor Free Trial or Enterprise Edition version 2.0 or later
- Delorean plugin version 1.2 or later (for more information, please see Installation below)
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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Download the above zipped installation program. You can optionally check MD5 of the downloaded zipped file.
Overview
The installation process follows:
- Unzip and run the installation program.
- Similar to all other NexentaStor Plugins, the Delorean Plugin is installed in two simple steps: first, make sure the plugin is present in the central software repository associated with your installed appliance, and second, actually install it onto the appliance. Both steps (detailed below) need to be executed only once on a per-appliance base.
Installation Steps
To install the plugin, run:
nmc$ setup plugin install delorean
Or, you can view, install and uninstall the NexentaStor extension module using appliance's web GUI, as illustrated below:
Notice above that "delorean" is listed as one of the remotely-available plugins. Simply click on the icon to its left, and then confirm request to install the plugin:
Post Installation
- 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.
Configuration
To help you get started, we have developed a powerful Configuration Wizard. The Wizard'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 source Windows folder
- Step 3. Setting up backup schedule
- Note:
Backup schedule is determined by the time set on the appliance and not on the local Windows machine.
The time on the appliance is in turn synchronized with the network (Network Time Protocol).
Please see NexentaStor User Guide for more information.
- Step 4. Selecting backup transport
- Step 5. Replicating extended Windows ACLs
- Step 6. VSS, snapshot retention policy and the type of destination
- Note:
On this installation screen you can enable option to create backups with Virtual Shadow Copy Service and set up number of the days to keep snapshots on the destination.
After configured period of keeping snapshots on the destination expires old snapshots are deleted automatically. If you set this value to zero, then no snapshots will be created.
- Step 7. CPU utilization by the backups
- Step 8. Exclude patterns
- Step 9. Comments
- Step 10. Summary
Search Tutorial
- 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:
Installation 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.
Question: How to collect Delorean logs?
Answer:
- Installer logs:
You can find Delorean Installer's logs in the system temporary directory. Type %TEMP% into address bar of your Windows Explorer and look for filesnames starting with Setup Log, for example Setup Log 2010-04-20 #001.txt.
- Delorean logs:
Type %APPDATA%\Delorean into address bar of the Windows Explorer. There you will find Delorean.log file.
Question: What user rights are required for installation of Nexenta Delorean?
Answer: To install Nexenta Delorean, your user account must have Administrator rights.
