v2.81.0

Client Profiles, and a clients list that tells you which machines are actually still backing up.

Client Profiles

Until now every client was configured from scratch. You worked out what a database server should back up, how often, how long to keep it — and then did it again from memory for the next one, and again for the one after that. Nothing recorded the decision, so the fifth register was configured slightly differently from the first and nobody noticed until a restore needed something that wasn't there.

A client profile describes a kind of machine — laptops, database servers, point-of-sale registers — and the settings a new client of that kind should start with: a backup template, a frequency and run hours, retention, and how to handle a client that drops out mid-backup. Assign one when you add a client and its first backup plan is filled in for you. Three profiles created once means onboarding a new register is: add the client, pick Registers, done.

The failure settings are the part with no equivalent anywhere else. Max Retry Attempts, Give Up On Running Jobs After and Retry Backoff used to be server-wide, so one number had to suit a laptop that closes its lid mid-backup and a database server on a wired LAN at the same time. Set it for the laptops and a genuinely stuck server sat unnoticed for an hour; set it for the servers and every laptop backup got killed and retried the moment someone walked into a meeting. Those three now sit on the profile, blank by default, and blank means "follow the server-wide setting" — so a profile only pins the ones it actually has an opinion about.

Editing a profile deliberately changes nothing about the clients already in it. Someone who tuned a plan for one awkward server does not lose that work because a colleague adjusted the profile it came from. Pushing changes down is a separate action, Apply to Clients, which counts the clients, plans and schedules it will overwrite before it does anything and tells you which fields it replaces and which it leaves alone.

Nothing about your current setup changes when you update. Every existing client is placed in a profile called Default, which carries the settings BBS already used and cannot be deleted. If you never open Settings → Profiles, your clients keep the plans, schedules, retention and failure handling they have today, and new clients behave exactly as they did before. The feature only does something once you create a profile of your own and assign a client to it.

Full documentation, including a worked example: Client Profiles.

The clients list answers a different question now

The list told you how many restore points and repositories a client had, which is not what you scan a client list for. Two columns have been added: Last Successful, in plain relative time, and Missed Since Success, the number of backups that have failed since. A client whose last success was three days ago with four failures behind it now looks different at a glance from one that ran an hour ago.

A client that has never backed up successfully counts every attempt rather than showing zero, which would have read as healthy.

The table also sorts, searches and pages, and the profile each client belongs to is shown as a column. Sorting uses the underlying value rather than the rendered text, so "38m ago" and "1.2 GB" order by time and size rather than alphabetically.

Notes

• The agent is unchanged in this release; clients on 2.80.0 do not need to update.
• Adds one database migration.