Comet Backup is a fast, secure, and fully customizable backup platform that gives businesses and IT providers complete control over their data protection. With modern chunking technology, flexible integrations, and white-label branding, Comet makes backup, recovery, and management effortless—delivering enterprise-grade performance without the complexity.
In this Product Demo Showcase, Mason Giles, Comet Backup’s CTO, introduces Comet Backup as a company revolutionizing modern data protection. The demo highlights Comet’s flexible approach, allowing IT providers and MSPs to backup and restore data on their own terms, with options for self-hosting or using popular cloud providers. Mason demonstrates the platform’s unique features, including incremental forever backup, client-side deduplication, and end-to-end encryption. The discussion emphasizes Comet’s speed, security, and control, showcasing its suitability for IT professionals seeking performance without hassle. The demo also covers setup, policy management, and the platform’s ability to protect a wide range of data sources, from servers to cloud accounts.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Comet Backup offers a comprehensive data protection strategy, beyond just file backup.
- The platform supports remote management, ideal for IT providers and managed service providers.
- Comet’s “incremental forever” technology eliminates the need for full reuploads, enhancing efficiency.
- The platform integrates deduplication, compression, and encryption for secure data management.
- Users can choose between Comet-hosted or self-hosted management console options.
- Comet supports a wide range of backup types, including file-level, disk image, and virtual machine backups.
- The platform allows for granular restore options, including physical and virtual machine restores.
- Comet’s policy control features enable IT administrators to manage user access and backup settings.
- The platform is compatible with various storage options, including cloud and local storage.
- Comet offers a free trial with additional credit through a promo code, making it accessible for new users.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Comet Backup
01:30 – Overview of Comet’s Features
04:00 – Remote Management Capabilities
07:15 – Incremental Forever Technology
10:45 – Backup and Restore Demonstration
14:30 – Policy Control and User Management
17:45 – Storage Options and Integration
21:00 – Advanced Backup Types
24:30 – Free Trial and Promo Code Offer
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:05.841)
Hello everyone. My name is Beau Hamilton, senior editor and multimedia producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions.
In today’s product demo showcase, we’ll give you a hands-on look at Comet Backup, a company helping reshape how businesses approach modern data protection. So their approach is quite simple. It’s give IT providers and MSPs the tools to backup and restore data quickly, securely, and on their own terms.
Many backup platforms, they kind of lock you into specific storage vendors or hosting models. Comet gives you a lot more flexibility, I would say. You can self-host, you can use Comet hosted servers or connect with popular cloud providers like AWS, Wasabi or Azure, whatever fits your setup the best. Comet is built around three main pillars. You got speed, security and control that uses client-side deduplication to make backups faster and lighter on bandwidth, encrypts everything end-to-end and updates continuously to keep pace with real world needs. So it’s kind of the software that feels like it’s built specifically for IT professionals who want performance without a lot of the hassle with some other solutions out there.
So today we’ll see how all that comes together in practice. Joining us is Mason Giles, Comet Backup’s Chief Technology Officer. He was actually the company’s first employee that has developed the platform into the full-fledged backup juggernaut that it is today. So he’s gonna show us how Comet handles setup, policy management, deduplication, encryption, and recovery among, I’m sure, many other things. So we’re really excited for it. Without further ado, let me hand it over to you, Mason. You can share your screen and get right into it.
Mason Giles (00:36.437)
Cool. Hey, thanks. And hi everyone. I’m Mason. I work for Comet Backup and we make backup software. It’s backup software for servers and for PCs. It handles virtual machines, databases, Exchange 365, laptops, Linux, Windows, Mac. A few things that make Comet special. One is we are all about remote management. Are you the kind of person who needs to remotely manage a user base? Because with Comet, you sort of deploy the backup agents and they connect to your management console server.
So we’re talking about managed service providers and MSPs. We’re talking about IT companies, internal IT teams, specialized backup providers, the sort of people who need to look after their users or manage a lot of service. And maybe that’s high touch. Maybe you go in and remotely fix problems. Or maybe it’s low touch if you just want to remotely glance at it.
So that’s one thing about Comet. And the other thing that makes us special is the tech. If you’re used to the traditional sort of full backup, incremental, incremental, then another incremental, then another full backup, you know, Comet is different. We are incremental forever. There’s no full reuploads, no synthetic fills, no differentials. It just works differently. We take today’s backup and yesterday’s backup and deduplicate them together. They’re deduplicated. You’re storing only the changes. You’re uploading only the changes, and that is incremental forever backup. So it’s next generation technology. There’s no chain. From a conceptual level, the backup jobs, they can be restored at the same speed. They can be deleted and aged out of retention sort of completely independently and of course there’s compression and encryption and everything. But hey, let’s just get started.
Mason Giles (02:28.723)
So I’m just going to sign up on our website. Based in New Zealand. Not putting my personal phone number in on stream.
So the first thing you’ll see when you sign up is this choice. So Comet hosted versus self hosted. So Comet is a client service system. The management console server is where you sort of manage and maintain all of your agents. So do you want a quick start, easy software as a service, or do you want that management console to be private, yours on-prem behind the firewall? And we’re just talking about the control plane at this point. You know, the transfer of actual backup data can work differently.
So I’m just going to choose the Comet hosted option for quick, easy software as a service and we’ll just get started as quickly as possible for this demo.
So this is my management console. And from here, I’m going to spend most of the rest of the demo showing off managing the backups for my user base. I’ve really left all the settings at default. You can see I’ve got an auto-generated domain. Of course, you can put your own domain name there. So I’m going to follow the little guide and add a user and I’m just going leave pretty much everything at defaults, this random password.
So this is a user account inside the management console. So one user is maybe one person or maybe one company but they’ve got one password and each user has got their own protected items. This is what we’ve selected to backup. Storage vaults which is where they’re backing up to and devices. So these are all the PCs and servers that this user has got our agent installed on. So I’m going to install the agent.
So for Windows, I’m doing this demo on Windows, there’s EXE and MSI options. They’re pretty much equivalent. They both support silent installation. The MSI is good if you’re rolling this out from Intune or from an RMM. I’m just going to pop that open and click Install. Once again, leaving everything on defaults.
And this is the desktop agent. So the user that I created, I’m just going to log in as that end user account. If I turn on advanced options, you can see it is connecting to the same management console server. So that’s the management console that’s going to be responsible for this device.
So when I register this device, behind the scenes, it’s setting things up for me. It’s setting up storage, provisioning storage accounts. And here we go, it’s popped up on my other monitor.
So this is the desktop app. And so now we’ve got a device and a storage vault. We still haven’t got any protected items. So let’s create one. So these are the things that Comet supports protecting. We’re adding more all the time. Proxmox is a recent one. But Comet can back up Hyper-V, VMware, SQL Server, MySQL Exchange, your Cloud 365 account, and so on. We’ll come back to some of these. But for now, let’s just do the basic file level backup. And I’m just going to back up my Pitches folder.
Obviously you can select any files and folders you like. There’s a lot of advanced functionality. Comment users, VSS snapshots by default. You can include and exclude by regular expressions back up over the network. ACLs, repiles points, but keeping it simple just backing up my pictures folder and I’m going to speed through the rest of this wizard commands, leaving this on default schedules. I actually am going to create a schedule. I’m going to I want this back up to run. Let’s say weekly on a Friday at 5 p.m. So that’s my schedule for this job. Retention, how many old versions of this backup do I want to keep? Also just going to leave us on defaults. That’s it and I want to run a backup now and we’re away and done. So that is sort of the basic workflow. You get your management console, you attach the device to it and then you make protected items and back it up to your storage vault.
So obviously for a backup software, the most important feature is not backup, funnily enough, but restore. So I’ll show you a restore as well from the desktop app. There’s a big restore button here, nice and obvious in those sort of stressful moments you want the restore button to be, you very obvious. So the restore process in Comet is also self-explanatory. You start with where is the data we’re restoring from. So I’ve got one storage vault.
And then inside that storage vault, you can see all of the backups that I’ve done into that vault. And so there’s one. It’s just got the one snapshot that I just made. Defaults, I just want the files back and now I can see the contents of that backup job. I can pick and choose individual pictures to restore. Or I can just go all files. And so I’ve selected all files and this is where do I want to restore them? I just want to restore them.
I can restore them to a custom path or just, you know, where they were back over their original path. So imagine the files have been deleted and I just want those files back right where they were. I choose restore to original paths, hit restore and we’re away. And that was pretty snappy.
So we’ve got a user account, we’ve got some data, we can successfully backup and restore, and that is gonna give us a good baseline to talk about some of the more advanced features in Comet. So first of all, I wanna talk about remote control. Can you see yourself doing this for your whole customer base, your whole user base? You know, the scenario, I’ve just gone through it here on the desktop app, you know, and in this case, there’s sort of a scenario where the user knows their own account password, the user can open up the desktop app on their own PC, do their own restore.
That is low touch from an IT management perspective, you know, just letting the user do whatever they want and that’s valid, but other people will be in a quite different situation. You know, a bit more big business, don’t want to be getting remote access to everyone’s desktops. If you want your files back, you know, raise a ticket with IT and we’ll do it remotely. so, Comet lets you do both. So, by default, it’s quite open up here for the end user to do things themselves. But let me show you what a more remote controlled version looks like. It’s really similar.
So if I go to the user and we can look at their protected items. And so this is the protected item that I just created. It’s a files and folders backing up the pictures and I can remotely view and change all of this person’s settings. See here. So I can remotely browse and see it’s backing up the pictures folder. If I’m happy with that configuration to remotely control it to run a restore, what I would do is go to the Devices tab and I can see this device is logged in here.
Pick the device to remote control. Now there’s lots of things that we can remote control that device to do. Key ones being backup and restore it. restore is exactly the same steps as the desktop app. You pick what storage and then from inside that storage, what backup snapshot do I want to restore? It’s just that same backup that I just took before. Restoring as files.
Once again I can remotely pick and choose files from inside that backup or just choose all items, restore to original paths, and that will kick off the job. And you can see it started running over here in the desktop app. If I check the logs, I can see it’s already finished.
So that’s sort of the remote angle. So now that we know how to remotely control a device as the IT administrator, let’s lock the customer down from being able to access the desktop app. So Comet has a lot of policy control features. So if I find the user again.
On the policies section, so there’s a lot of sections and a lot of options in here. I’m just going to look specifically at one of the options here to prevent opening the application. And if I apply that policy, you’ll see the desktop app just disappeared. So that takes effect immediately. Now the user cannot open the desktop app and they’re going to have to contact us for support for restores. I’ll just undo that again, should be able to open it back up.
So this whole policy section is templated, you know, I’ve just set this right now specifically on a user, but I think what you would generally do in practice is create a global policy and then assign that policy to groups of users at a time. And the policies can do lots of things. For instance, OK, let’s create a new policy.
So these users say they shouldn’t be able to create their own protected items. They’re just going to have an automatic one, and this is sort of a common situation where you’ve got lots of PCs. They’ve all got files in the same place. Maybe you’re an application vendor and there’s a certain application files in a certain path that you always want to back up. So let’s create an automatic protected item that’s going to roll out in bulk. That automatic one is going to be if this is a Windows device.
Then we’re going to back up the pictures folder again. So files and folders, protected item type. now because this policy is a template, we’re not dealing with a specific device here. There’s no device to live browse. Besides, everyone’s pictures folder is going to be a slightly different path. C drive uses your name pictures. So we need to use a pattern or a regular expression inclusion. I’m just going to use this convenient example here and that is going to use that sort of pattern inclusion to find everyone’s pitches folders.
Mason Giles (13:41.173)
So this policy is the force backup pitches only policy. So I create that policy and then if I go to the users and I see this user and instead of and I’m going to apply this policy to the user, hit save and you’ll see over here in the desktop app. Suddenly this user no longer has the ability to add their own protected items. They’ve got this forced on one that I can’t even edit because it’s forced on by policy.
That’s cool. Let me just reset that, end with it.
So that’s protected items and policies. Let’s talk a little bit about storage. How does the storage work? So when I look at this user and I look at their storage, what’s been created here is an automatic Wasabi account and all of these S3 credentials. So Comet can use any storage, whether that’s a local hard drive, Amazon AWS, Azure, bring your own SFTP server, network share.
RAID array in a data center on-prem, off-prem, you you name it. And these here are private credentials just for this user’s storage, not shared with anyone else. And so in this case, the device is backing up direct to cloud, you know, it’s backing up direct to a Asabi. The data is not going through our management console. We do have a feature for that called storage gateway. If you want the device to back up to your own operated backup server. But these credentials here, the way they got here,
Let’s use this link here to go off our server, off our management console, back to the account website. On the Comet account website, we can see we’ve got one service, which is just this Comet hosted management console. So no self-hosted service. Where actually are these backups going? When I set this up, we have those two options side by side. I just left everything at defaults. For new accounts at Comet, the default is to use Comet storage and that is Comet storage powered by Wasabi. Wasabi are one of the most fast, reliable, low cost cloud storage providers out there. We’re very proud to have integrated with them. And of course you’re welcome to use any cloud provider with Comet to bring your own. But getting Wasabi via Comet only costs what Comet, well, what Wasabi costs 699 a terabyte. We’re passing that cost on directly. The bill goes through us, but there’s no markup and you just have full access to it like.
If I click here I can see all the buckets. I can see the root access keys and don’t worry, I’m revoking these keys straight after this this meeting. So the root access key for my Wasabi account here. Is what is it? 6-2-I-R-D. Something something. And if I go back inside my comment management console. So those root access keys are set up in the settings page for something we call storage templates.
So there’s one template in here and you can see it’s the same root access keys 6 to IRD, then if we look at our user account on that user’s storage vaults, their access key is something different. So we are not sharing the root access keys for users and actually the data location is slightly different too. So users can’t see each other’s data. So that storage template is responsible for, you know, when that storage template is used it stamps out an individual private isolated set of credentials so users can’t see each other’s data.
And so I can stamp out new storage vaults from that template at any time. So I’ll just click this button and this is going to talk to a sabi, get new credentials. And that’s done and that’s come back.
So this is the one that I’ve already stored data in and this is the new one and they’ll have different access keys. So the key here was WC something and the key here is SE something. So now this person has two storage faults and I can even add another custom one. You know, I don’t have to use my templates. I can add a custom one. You know, I’ll do this from the desktop app. So in the desktop app I can also look at my available storage. I’m going to add a new custom, can use the templates or custom storage vault and I’m going to make a new storage vault that is a local path backup and that is just going to be C drive slash my backup storage.
So now I’ve got three storage vaults. And so now when I go to backup, I will have three storage vaults to choose from. like this looks like Wasabi, but if you don’t want your customers to know you’re using Wasabi, then all of this can be white label rebranded. So just to wrap that up, the storage template is used to provision individual sort of private storage vaults and the vault just belongs to this one user account.
So that’s StorageVaults. Let’s show off some more backup features. So I’ll show off a disk image backup. So disk image, we’re talking about taking a block-level backup of disks and partitions. So same process, you just create a protected item and then pick the drives to backup. So this is the disk and these are the partitions on it. The partitions on the disk, you can see my C drive, my system reserved. I’m just going to pick my Windows Recovery partition. See if we can keep to time. And that’s it, leaving everything. I don’t need a schedule for this. And so that’s my protected item is defined and I’m going to back it up to my new C drive local path storage vaults. And disk image backups also work on Linux, so you can do block-level backups of a Linux device.
So that backup was pretty quick. Once the backup job finishes, there’s a few special things about doing a disk image backup. Mainly when I go to restore, there are a lot more options. So looking inside my new local path storage vaults, there’s one backup in there, which is my disk image backup. Lots more options. So physical restore, restore to physical devices. Now I only backed up this one partition. So this is what’s in the backup job.
And this is my physical hardware that I’ve got here. So I only backed up this one partition so I can do a partition to partition restore. And normally I would do a whole disk to disk restore. But I can do a partition to partition restore and physically get that block device back. The one interesting thing about this is restoring over your C drive, restoring over your Windows partition while Windows is running. It’s like doing surgery on yourself. So for that it’s best to use our recovery media feature.
But as well as the physical restore, there’s files and folders restore. So that block device backup, if I restore it, I can see it shows up as a VMDK file for restore, more interesting, granular restore. So granular restore is I’ve done this backup at a block device level, but I want to see what’s inside the block device. And when I unfold that VMDK file that we just saw as a file is now appearing as a folder and I can browse and extract individual files from inside my little recovery. Have you ever looked inside the Windows recovery partition before? There’s like some system files in there.
And lastly, these virtual machine options. So if you imagine I had backed up the whole C drive just then, what I have is a backup of the disk of this physical machine. So I can then restore it as a virtual machine. So a physical to virtual P to V migration. And this system in Comet is fully interchangeable. So if you do a disk image backup, you can restore it to Hyper-V. If you do a Hyper-V backup, you can restore it to VMware, do a VMware backup, restore it to Proxmox. And it all works fully to virtual boot your backup jobs.
Still have a bit more time. I’ll show off a few more backup types. So Comet supports backing up your 365 account. It’s pretty simple to use. The first thing that I have to do is give Comet permission to read the data in my 365 account. So you can do that manually following our docs. So we can do the one-click process.
Okay, I’ve done my two factor. So what’s happening is behind the scenes Comet is registering an application using the Azure Graph API. So it’s registering an application inside my 365 account. And so if you log into 365, you can see the application there. You can revoke access at any time. You can enable auditing and so on.
So that’s the application generated for 365. And then from there, this is going to browse my 365 account and I can pick and choose who I want to back up or just click here to back up everything.
You can see this user here, SMtestbox1, they’re a normal user. They’ve got these services. They’ve got contacts, calendar, mail. They’ve got a OneDrive. So I’ll select them for backup. Leaving these on default. Don’t need a schedule. And I’m going to start that backup now.
And so this is a fully private 365 backup. It’s running on hardware that I control backing up to storage that I control.
While we wait for Microsoft, I’ll just show off a few others as well. show off Proxmox. Proxmox is a little bit exciting at the moment. So Comet supports backing up Hyper-V, VMware and Proxmox virtual machines. And the workflow, it’s just the same. You create a protected item that defines what you want to protect, pop in the details for your Proxmox server in the details from my Proxmox server and then I can select virtual machines for backup. Even individual disks or I can just select everything, click next and that’s all there is to it give Microsoft a few more seconds to finish this back up.
So my Office 365 backup job has just finished. So now if I go to restore this backup job from my backup storage, we’ll see what the options are for an Office 365 restore.
So we can restore their emails and SharePoint in OneDrive just as local files, email files, or we can restore it back to 365 if they’ve lost data inside 365 and just want it back. So same as usual, you can pick and choose individual things to restore or choose all items. There’s one extra feature in here. If I open this person’s inbox, I can preview an email before restoring it. And this is often a big help if you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for. And there is also a search system. And all of this also works in the web interface too. So you can do it remotely if you’re that sort of sysadmin.
One of the last things I want to say about Comet is all of these backup jobs are being deduplicated together inside the same storage vault. So if you do an Office 365 backup and then you restore some email files to your desktop and then you backup your desktop with a file backup job and then you do a disk image backup of your whole PC, all of these things are getting deduplicated together and only need to be stored once.
So I think I’ve covered quite a lot. There’s a lot more to comment. And if I jump back to my server, we should be seeing some stats showing up on the web dashboard here.
So that’s Comet, first launched in 2017, so eight years ago. It’s pretty easy to use and everything just works. That’s desktop, remote browse, commands, scheduling, quotas, email reporting. There’s a lot more advanced stuff you can do. There’s web hooks, there’s integrations. I haven’t showed off Linux, Mac, SQL Server, Hyper-V, VMware. The other key things about Comet is it’s very affordable. You can white label it and add a margin and you can sign up instantly with no credit card. You saw me do it.
Beau Hamilton (28:15.391)
All right, thank you, Mason. I really enjoyed this fantastic walkthrough of the platform. And yeah, like you were saying, I love seeing all the granular settings and how it’s more than just backing up files. You really get the whole kind of data protection strategy with Comet here, which is super important in today’s digital world. So yeah, thanks again for walking us through this demo. Now, maybe you can talk a little bit about the free trial that is offered with Comet Backup.
Mason Giles (28:45.751)
Sure, so we have a free trial on our website, that’s what I’ve used today for the demo, but if you sign up with a promo code SOURCEFORGE you will get an additional $100 free credit for your first 90 days.
Beau Hamilton (28:55.105)
Perfect, that’s right. Sign up using the code SOURCEFORGE for $100 off for 90 days. That’s pretty great. With that said, Mason, thanks again. I really appreciate you walking us through this and giving us all these highlights.
Mason Giles (29:09.417)
No worries, anytime.
Beau Hamilton (29:11.303)
Thank you all for watching everyone. I am your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts and product demos. I will talk to you in the next one.