Backing up a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall with PowerShell

For some time there have been plenty of examples of backing up Palo Alto Firewalls with curl commands (extracting the files using the XML API) however that may not sit well with some Windows administrators who want to use PowerShell. As such I’ve put together the BackupPANNGFWConfig repo on GitHub which contains the scripts to get ahold of the API… Read more



Synology DiskStation as a Backup Target for Windows PCs and Macs

As some readers may know I currently work in Higher Education and while all of the business data is trivial to backup providing any level of backup service to students and academics is significantly harder. The challenges faced include the myriad of Operating Systems in use (Windows/OSX/Linux), the fact that the devices being backed up are inherently ‘untrusted’ (i.e. owned by the… Read more



Bare metal recovery – Element not found (0x80070490)

I’ve recently been testing our disaster recovery abilities particularly in restoring servers from the bare metal recovery feature of System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012. When restoring one of our servers (that is a virtual machine) I was getting the error message below just before the drive data starts to copy over. The system image restore failed. Error details: Element… Read more



Windows Server 2008 R2 bare metal backup – which drives?

If you are running System Centre Data Protection Manager (2010/2012) on Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 you may or may not know that when you are running a Bare Metal/System State Backup you are actually using the built in Windows Server Backup feature to keep your data safe. One thing that baffled me is why on some servers the backups… Read more



DPM 2012 can’t backup server with Sophos Installed

While setting up our new backup server (System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012) one of the issues we came across was with it failing the data synchronizations with a error message like this one- Type:     Synchronization Status:  Failed Description:        Changes for Volume C:\ on <servername><domainname> cannot be applied to \\?\Volume{4fac41a1-0f58-11dc-8993-806d6172696f}\ProgramData\Sophos\AutoUpdate\Cache\savxp\. (ID 112 Details: Cannot create a file when that file… Read more