Unlock the Power of Free Email Backups: This Summer with ExchangeDefender LiveArchive (Take Survey!)
The new ExchangeDefender LiveArchive has been very popular with our clients as a live email backup service. With backups typically being the last thing organizations want to spend their IT budget on, it’s no surprise that a free backup service that you own and can archive indefinitely would be compelling.
We’re trying to help our partners and clients roll out LiveArchive this summer and we would like to hear from you. We’re organizing our summer webinar series and this 3-minute survey would help us focus the schedule and content to serve you better:
To help as many of you get started as fast as possible, ExchangeDefender is considering several short-form or small-group interactive webinars several times a week during July and August. During these webinars, we’ll cover the basics of the service and help you actually complete the deployment of LiveArchive (it only takes a few minutes with the public cloud)!
What is Live Archive Email Backup?
ExchangeDefender LiveArchive offers secure backup, long-term archiving, and eDiscovery services for Office 365, Gmail, and cloud mail.
Sales Collateral? Yes! We have a Data Sheet, Live Archive Email Backup Advantage sheet, plus case studies!
5 Reasons Why You Need Live Archive Email Backup
In the fast-paced world of business, safeguarding your critical communication is non-negotiable. That’s where Live Archive Email Backup steps in, offering a comprehensive solution to address the evolving challenges businesses face today.
1. Security at the Forefront
Value the security of your business data with Live Archive. Safeguard your critical communication from potential threats, ensuring the integrity of your business information is maintained at all times.
2. Fortify Against Ransomware
In the battle against crypto-locking threats, Live Archive becomes your shield. Protect your email backups, ensuring your data remains accessible even in the face of a compromise. It’s the ultimate defense strategy for your digital assets.
3. Long-Term Email Preservation
Ensure the continuity of your business with Live Archive’s long-term email preservation. Back up and archive email data for extended periods, meeting regulatory and business continuity requirements seamlessly.
4. Budget-Friendly IT Solutions
Navigate the complex IT landscape with ease by choosing Live Archive—a cost-effective email backup solution. It provides robust protection without straining your IT budget, making security accessible to businesses of all sizes.
5. Storage Flexibility for Your Needs
Your data, your choice. Live Archive offers storage flexibility, allowing you to store your critical information on the cloud, on-premises, or both. Tailor your backup strategy to suit your business needs effortlessly.
Live Archive Email Backup is the key to unlocking peace of mind in your business operations. Prioritize security, accessibility, and longevity—choose Live Archive for a reliable and comprehensive email backup solution. Your data deserves nothing less.
ExchangeDefender Network Upgrade: Supercharged Security and Disaster Recovery for Your M365 Clients
At ExchangeDefender, we’re obsessed with keeping your clients’ emails safe and secure. That’s why we’ve just completed a massive network upgrade, designed to empower you, the IT Managed Service Provider, to offer unparalleled disaster recovery and enhanced security for your M365 clients.
Why the Upgrade? The Cloud Needs Saving Too!
Remember the good ol’ days of on-prem email outages? Well, guess what? The cloud isn’t immune!
- M365 Outages Happen: We’ve all been there – clients waking up to a down Office 365 tenant. Scary stuff.
- Data Loss Lurks: Lost emails due to strange glitches or language barriers (seriously, Croatian?) are a real threat.
Building on LiveArchive, we’re massively expanding our disaster recovery businesses due to increased demand for client protection on the Microsoft M365 network.
Our upcoming live mail caching service is here to save the day! We’ll cache copies of your clients’ emails for 24 hours, ensuring no email gets lost due to infrastructure issues. Need a message from the past day? Simply request a redelivery – problem solved!
Network Upgrade? More Like a Network Revolution!
To make Live Mail Caching a reality, here’s how we did it:
- Open-sourced LiveArchive: This empowers you to deploy massive email archiving solutions for your clients on their own cloud.
- Infrastructure Overhaul: We’ve upgraded nearly every switch, firewall, core router, and most of our backend to handle the massive data demands of live caching.
- Network Failover on Autopilot: BGP magic ensures seamless service delivery across multiple data centers, automatically routing around network issues and regional outages. No configuration changes on your end are needed!
In the coming quarter, we’re excited to unveil all these new services.
While email remains a prime target for cyberattacks (not a good thing!), our core focus continues to be protecting traffic and identifying threats. However, our M365 clients are facing a surge of issues and are turning to us for solutions.
For instance, when Microsoft experiences delivery delays or mail latency problems, our ExchangeDefender Inbox service becomes the go-to solution for accessing critical OTP/MFA tokens.
Many clients have also adopted Inbox as their preferred webmail client due to its speed and lightweight design.
As Microsoft prepares to sunset Basic Authentication, many legacy SMTP services and mail-enabled applications will become inoperable. To address this growing demand for reliable and secure email routing and delivery, we’ve significantly upgraded our network and services this past quarter.
Email delivery problems happen.
With ExchangeDefender, however, these problems won’t impact your operations. That’s our unwavering commitment, and we’re thrilled to announce the expanded ExchangeDefender network is here to serve you and ensure the continued security of your email.
P.S. Sounds expensive and boy was it!! We’re in an era where any excuse is used to raise prices, so this might come as a bit of a surprise: There will be no change in pricing as a result of all these upgrades. Thank you for keeping us in business in our 4th decade and thank you for trusting us with your email.
How To Get LiveArchive Web UI
By now we hope everyone who needs a backup has started it via ExchangeDefender LiveArchive and as previously mentioned we’ve got a huge new feature to show off this Wednesday:
During this event, we will discuss the ExchangeDefender LiveArchive Web UI, the open-source eDiscovery platform for your LiveArchive email backups. This stack can be hosted anywhere, even on your PC as in the example below. With database services holding metadata and the location of the email message on S3 storage, the LiveArchive user interface is very similar to webmail platforms. We even have themes that are inspired by GMail and M365 platforms so users can access their backups in the interface that feels similar to the one they are familiar with.
We know a lot of our partners and clients like to tinker, so if you like to get ahead here is a sample docker-compose.yml you can use to launch LiveArchive Web UI right now (production branch):
services:
app:
image: public.ecr.aws/y9g1h8n8/exchangedefender/livearchive:latest
extra_hosts:
- 'host.docker.internal:host-gateway'
ports:
- '${APP_PORT:-80}:80'
volumes:
- livearchive-config:/app/storage/app/settings
- livearchive-loadbalancer:/data
environment:
LIVEARCHIVE_PERSISTENCE: browser
networks:
- livearchive
volumes:
livearchive-config:
livearchive-loadbalancer:
networks:
livearchive:
driver: bridge
Then simply point your browser to the container or if you’re running it on your PC http://localhost
That should give you everything you need to access LiveArchive backups with a modern and responsive eDiscovery frontend you own – we should discuss more details about deployment, different cloud hosting options, best practices, and different ways you can use LiveArchive Web UI. This should be plenty to get you started and get your questions ready for the live webinar this Wednesday, February 7th. and we look forward to seeing you there.
P.S. If you’re looking for old LiveArchive business continuity features, they are now a part of ExchangeDefender Inbox! Dive into the new world of ExchangeDefender Inbox, our smartest, most advanced email outage protection. Unlock insights on top features and highlights with our new brochure!
Getting Ready for LiveArchive UI – What You Need to Know!
ExchangeDefender will be launching the LiveArchive Web UI during our webinar next week and we are looking forward to showing you how to launch it with a single command! In the meantime, this blog post is intended to give you a heads-up about the requirements and functionality so you can make design decisions.
Docker & Design
In a recent post, we discussed why MariaDB/RDS is required for the LiveArchive Web UI: it’s where we store the message metadata such as sender/recipient/subject/etc. These elements drive the UI and enable users to locate messages, search, and complete eDiscovery and email recovery tasks.
ExchangeDefender has organized the entire LiveArchive Web UI into a single container that can run on your own docker on a workstation or NAS in your office, across a wide variety of virtualization products and services, as well as public cloud like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This makes ExchangeDefender Web UI easy to update, easy to manage, and easy to tweak to your requirements.
There are two ways to configure and start the container: preconfigured with environment variables or on-demand browser configuration. If you start the container without the environment defined you will be presented with a web configuration wizard that will prompt for S3 and RDS credentials. If this is the first time you’re deploying LiveArchive Web UI or just want to test it, this is the best way. Once you close your browser all the configuration vanishes and nobody else has access to your mail.
After you’ve configured everything to your liking and are looking to put the service into production, place the appropriate information in the container environment variables, and the container will always launch in production mode and bypass the wizard configuration.
Authentication
ExchangeDefender Web UI was designed to facilitate your email backup and eDiscovery needs. Our experience in compliance archiving and long-term email archiving has allowed us to work with countless organizations and one thing they all have in common is that they all have their own unique access and control needs.
ExchangeDefender Web UI by default presents all the available mailboxes and each email address has its own path. Using this predictable data storage process your Web Application Firewall can easily be configured to include or exclude data by path alone.
We designed the solution so it can be launched quickly, accessed, and managed without a lot of technical skill, and so it can be quickly modified/optimized for production. LiveArchive offers a lot of solutions to modern email problems and the flexibility means you can run different LiveArchive Web UI for different personnel or different tasks.
Resources & Customization
ExchangeDefender Web UI is completely free and open source. This means you can download it, modify it, and use it freely.
It also means that the solution will live even after ExchangeDefender as an organization is gone. You will not find any references or callbacks to our network and all the protocols are fully documented. This enables you to truly craft a failover email solution that can be completely disconnected from the Internet and placed into cold storage / safe.
Resource-wise the container is a little more than a web server and you can run hundreds of users with even the minimal 1 cpu / 1gb ram. This is possible because the SQL workload and data storage are handled by other services.
We hope you’re as excited about the launch as we are. Please join us for the webinar to see how it’s done and we’ll even help you set yours up right after the event! Just think of a good subdomain to point to your new LiveArchive backup platform.
‘LiveArchive Web UI’ Launch Webinar – Join Now!
The new ExchangeDefender LiveArchive has been delighting our clients for months and we’ve got a surprise for you coming in February with a huge new feature pack we can’t wait to show you:
ExchangeDefender LiveArchive Web UI is the free, open-source, host-anywhere platform that will make it easy to access and perform eDiscovery tasks with your LiveArchive backups. Instead of just staring at a directory in S3, you can have a beautiful interface to quickly locate, view, and export messages. You can host it anywhere that offers container hosting or on your PC, you have the entire source code that’s free forever that you can customize and build on, and it’s free!
We’ve even rolled out similar user interface elements so that the experience will feel familiar to users of Microsoft M365 or Google Gmail:
During the launch webinar, we will go over the features, execute a full deployment so you can see how easy and quick the process is, and go over the security best practices. In less than an hour, you will have all the expertise needed to position, price, deploy, and manage the entire LiveArchive backup system.
Preparing for LiveArchive Retirement
As mentioned on our recent webinars and blog posts, LiveArchive has worked very hard for us for decades and it’s time for it to go to Florida and retire.
The new kid on the block – ExchangeDefender Inbox – has been running our client’s business continuity for over a year and it’s proven to be more efficient and popular than LiveArchive. Just log in to your account (https://admin.exchangedefender.com) or use passwordless login and click on Inbox. You’ll have the last two weeks of email waiting for you there and you can send/receive while your email server/mailbox/or whatever is down or under maintenance.
Longer Term Archiving
While Inbox will take care of our clients’ email needs when their email is having issues, many of you need long-term archiving. If LiveArchive was ever power-used it would be in the realm of data recovery after a disaster, cryptolocker, or other threat destroyed the client’s email infrastructure. For those of you who are aware of the risk, there will be a need for archiving to go way beyond two weeks – even years. This is what the new LiveArchive will start doing for you on January 1st, 2024!
First, let’s get ready for the retirement of the current LiveArchive – the service will shut off on December 31st, 2023 at which point all data including backups and configurations will be removed from our network. This means that if you wish to keep current LiveArchive contents the migration request must be put in as a ticket at our support site at https://support.exchangedefender.com. Simply open a ticket with the subject “LiveArchive Migration” and provide the domain names you wish to migrate and the S3/RDS login credentials by December 1st, 2023. As promised on the webinar, we are offering this migration free of charge to our clients and partners but you need to get in the line by December 1st and have your AWS S3/RDS or self-hosted setup completed.
Second, if you need any help with AWS S3/RDS or if you’d like assistance with deploying this solution in your home office or data center, we got you too. If you need help and get in touch with us by December 1st, we’ll take care of it for you. It’s super simple, takes about 5 minutes total, and is extensively documented – but we love our clients and if you want an extra pair of hands we can help you. After December 1st (and depending on availability) we will take care of the setup for a one-time fee of $499 for AWS or $999 for self-hosted.
Future of LiveArchive
We look forward to this middle tier that every organization that relies on email to run their business needs. For business continuity, Inbox will give you access to email anywhere, anytime. For backups and long-term retention across various clouds and storage options, LiveArchive will take care of archiving your data. For additional assurance and best-in-class storage that meets complex compliance and insurance requirements, ComplianceArchive is your eDiscovery and compliance archiving solution. Simply put no matter how critical email is to your organization we’ve got a solution that fits your problems and your budget.
The new LiveArchive will start doing for you on January 1st, 2024!
Announcing LiveArchive.Next
We’re excited to introduce you to our next version of LiveArchive: a long-term email archiving and backup solution that you can take with you. With the new LiveArchive we had to solve some unique challenges our clients face in 2023 and beyond:
1. We don’t have any room in our IT budget (and need to save $)
2. If we get compromised our backups will get crypto locked too
3. We have to protect and backup our email for years
We heard you loud and clear and the LiveArchive.next was designed from the ground up to give you the peace of mind that you’ll have access to your critical data even if Microsoft wipes your account, even if you get crypto locked out of your network, even if we go out of business, and yes it can also do it for you nearly free of charge.
Choice of Storage
LiveArchive.next uses object-based storage backend that is widely used and available for free with full source code. You don’t have to worry about the product getting discontinued or the company going out of business and most modern IT workers will have experience/certification for it. ExchangeDefender provides documentation on how to set a service up with Amazon Web Services using the S3 object storage if you want to keep your backups in the cloud. We also provide docker documentation for those who want to keep the backups on their own Synology NAS or as affordable as a Raspberry Pi.
There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to how you protect your backups and the point is to have flexibility that will fit your needs. LiveArchive.next will accommodate you no matter where you point it. Some organizations may rely on LiveArchive in the cloud to reduce complexity while others will point LiveArchive to their office NAS where they can save years of mailboxes and terabytes of data on an appliance/drives that can be taken offsite like old-timey tape backups you heard about in in IT history class.
Choice of Database Options
LiveArchive.next can optionally store your message metadata in an SQL database. While this is an optional part that isn’t required for backups to work, it does make LiveArchive very user-friendly. Without the database, all your messages will still be backed up and you will still be able to retrieve them directly from the S3 object storage bucket through a friendly web user interface or S3 client.
With Amazon RDS or MySQL configured, ExchangeDefender will also send message metadata to your database: sender email address, recipient email address, subject, date, etc. This information is used by our LiveArchive Web UI service to show users the friendly webmail interface you’ve become accustomed to.
This feature is optional but highly recommended by ExchangeDefender and you’ll appreciate it immensely the first time you’re sent on a quest to retrieve an email from 4 years ago.
Choose to be Live
Most backups are still performed as a scheduled task / job and only run periodically. When there is an issue the alert may or may not be sent to your IT staff and responsible IT providers have staff that frequently manually checks and verifies backups.
ExchangeDefender LiveArchive is live, meaning that a message that was received in your Outlook will be received in your LiveArchive archive in seconds instead of hours or days. There are no jobs or backup tasks to monitor or review – and we’ll notify you the second we identify a problem.
When you enable database services your users will be able to access their LiveArchive in realtime as well, so for those of you trying to save $ on IT this will help you to diversify some of the monitoring and risk away.
Additionally, everything being live means that our service will backup and archive email the moment it arrives so there is no job to set up, no new mailboxes or services to enroll. If the mail is hitting a mailbox in your organization you can expect it to automatically show up in LiveArchive in seconds.
To find out more about the next LiveArchive please join us for an informative webinar on November 8th, 2023. Take the moment to sign up for the ExchangeDefender LiveArchive Migration Service if you’d like us to port your existing LiveArchive data to your next LiveArchive. Check out all the documentation we’re putting out there and get in touch with us early because this service is in heavy demand and December quickly books up with EOY projects.
We look forward to helping you expand and improve your email protection in 2024 and beyond!
Sunsetting LiveArchive
On December 31st, our current version of LiveArchive will be decommissioned. Inbox, a business continuity solution we launched last year, has already taken the workload of LiveArchive and it does the job better, faster, with fewer clicks.
LiveArchive served our client base well for over a decade and we’re thankful for all the disasters it’s saved us and our clients from. Now that we’re looking at 2024 and beyond, LiveArchive must solve new problems. For starters, most email is no longer hosted on low-grade hardware in SMB offices managed by part-time hobbyist IT: It’s now professionally managed in high-end data centers. The primary concern is no longer “What if my T1 Internet connection goes down?”; “BACKUPS ARE OUR RESPONSIBILITY” and keeping all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea.
COVID and the work-from-home era have only exacerbated the problem of how quickly (if at all) you’ll get your email back when the disaster occurs. Cloud operators are vague in their data protection statements and there is no way to audit it. Backup tools and services similarly offer few guarantees and the supply chain attacks have only gotten more prominent.
New LiveArchive Migration Service
New LiveArchive is designed to help solve the 3 problems clients have with protecting cloud email:
1. We don’t have any room in our IT budget (and need to save $)
2. If we get compromised our backups will get cryptolocked too
3. We have to protect and backup our email
ExchangeDefender LiveArchive.next webinar on November 8th, 2023 covered exactly how the next version of LiveArchive is going to help you solve all of these problems.
Furthermore, we announced a LiveArchive Migration Service for our clients who wish to have the LiveArchive data ported to the new LiveArchive. Because LiveArchive is IMAP based we can pull existing LiveArchive data into the new version. We can use the same IMAP process to bring over mailboxes hosted on any other IMAP accessible (M365, Office365, Gmail, Exchange, and virtually every legacy email service).
In order to get your data migrated all you have to do is configure your new LiveArchive service and put your ticket request in by December 1st, 2023. We take care of everything else and to reward our loyal clients over the years the service will be provided free of charge (est $499 value).
LiveArchive MSP Launch
As you’ve read/heard we’re expanding our LiveArchive offering to include unlimited backups of email (external + inter-domain/office) powered by an affordable and flexible S3 object storage. We’re nearing completion of the deployment with our enterprise and managed clients and are starting to schedule rollouts for our MSP and SMB clients in November.
ExchangeDefender LiveArchive will enable you to provide long-term archiving and email backup. It may surprise you that none of the email hosting operations includes a backup – so if your mailbox gets accidentally deleted, if you suffer a crypto locker or similar compromise, if you have a malicious actor internally, or if you get hacked – all your data is at risk. The vendor will quickly point you to their terms of service that tell you data backups are your responsibility. LiveArchive has traditionally been the “backup of last resorts” to many of our clients who trusted their vendor for backups or used a local NTFS backup facility.
To thank our partners and clients for their business, we’re including this in our offering free of charge but you must deploy it in 2023. This type of service starts around $3-5/month/mailbox for MSP resellers with a big volume discount so if you’re currently backing up your Exchange or Office365 / M365 or Gmail you’ll be able to save your clients ~$30-60/mailbox every year!
We want to make our partners look good with this new service and invest in a free rollout service for LiveArchive. Every Office365 client we demoed this service to has signed up for it and we fully intend to charge for new domains after January 1st so if you want to grandfather this offering for free and make some $ during a tough economic cycle, we’re here for you:
LiveArchive Orientation Webinar
November 8th, 2023, 12PM EST
To sign up, https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/9154739856133683550
Webinar attendance is required in order to get LiveArchive deployment and support, if you cannot make it to the event don’t worry the recording will be available shortly after the event ends. Please keep in mind this offering has had enormous interest from our partners in particular (again, you’ll be able to save your clients $30-60/user/year). Please do not delay as we fully expect to book our 2023 deployment calendar by mid-November. To get ready, launch a Minio instance or set up a free Amazon S3 account and confirm they are accessible from the Internet. We look forward to seeing you on November 8th, sign up today!