Quest Rapid Recovery provides the ability to replicate restore points to off-site location. More than often, connectivity to these locations has limited bandwidth and is sometimes even unstable. Unfortunately, Rapid Recovery doesn't do well with unstable connectivity: more than often, replication jobs abort because of high latency. Luckily, you can tweak the timeout parameters through the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\AppRecovery\Core\CoreSettings\ClientTimeoutSettings Increase the values of ReadWriteTimeout and ConnectionTimeout to 1 hour.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\AppRecovery\Core\Replication\ReplicationService Increase the values of VolumeImageSessionTimeout and RemoteReplicat  ...

After updating Rapid Recovery to 6.1, you will notice the reporting Powershell scripts (such as Reports.ps1) no longer work.

When running such a script, the following error is generated:

Exception calling "LoadFrom" with "1" argument(s): "Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\ProgramFiles\AppRecovery\Core\CoreService\coreadmin\bin\Reporting.Implementation.dll' or one of its dependencies. The systemcannot find the file specified."

This is caused by several auxilliary script files not being updated as part of the general 6.1 release of Rapid Recovery, causing the reporting scripts (such as Reports.ps1) not to work properly.

To resolve, you can either dow  ...

When performing a backup using VSS, a warning is logged in the Application event log of Windows with ID 8230 while taking the VSS snapshot. The backup may subsequently fail.

The warning states:

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Failed resolving account Administrator with status 1376. Check connection to domain controller and VssAccessControl registry key. Operation: PrepareForSnapshot EventContext: Execution Context: Writer Writer Class Id: {afbab4a2-367d-4d15-a586-71dbb18f8485} Writer Name: Registry Writer Writer Instance ID: {0c8f797c-42cb-410d-a2c3-2877a6c93e38}Error-specific details: Error: NetLocalGroupGetMemebers(Administrator), 0x80070560, The specified local group does   ...

Backup of a SQL Server may fail with a VSS error.

From the log, the following message can be found:

One or more errors occurred. ---> Replay.Core.Contracts.Transfer.VssGeneralErrorException: There was a problem with the VSS subsystem on '(agent-machine)l'. ---> Replay.Agent.Contracts.ShadowCopy.ShadowCopyWriterFailedException: The VSS writer 'SqlServerWriter' failed during the 'DoSnapshotSet' phase with error WriterErrorNonRetryable. The VSS writer state is FailedAtPrepareSnapshot ---> Replay.Common.Contracts.ReplayException

In the Application event log on the machine, event 8229 is logged:

Event 8229
A VSS writer has rejected an event with error 0x800423f4, The writer experienc  ...

For some reason, if an upgrade of an AppAssure/Dell Rapid Recovery Agent is not succesfully completed or cancelled, a subsequent upgrade may fail with the following error message:

Error
Destination path is not empty. Please choose another one.

If an upgrade was cancelled or has failed for some reason, the following upgrade attempt will try to perform a complete installation. Because not all files and/or folders have been removed, the installer will not continue and will display the error message.

To resolve the problem, manually remove the files and folders, but leave any registry keys intact to ensure a proper upgrade without losing any settings.

If it is running, stop the Agent or Core  ...

Dell has changed the name of its acquired AppAssure to Dell Data Protection Rapid Recovery. AppAssure (latest version is 5.4.3) is no longer being maintained, so upgrading to Rapid Recovery (latest version 6.0.2 at the time of writing) is a requirement for continued support. Fortunately, performing the upgrading is not really difficult, and can be done without too much downtime for your backup.

Additional information, including a compatibility and upgrade matrix can be found here:

How to Upgrade AppAssure 5.4 to Rapid Recovery 6.X (181997)

Dell Support Policy (compatibility matrix for Core and Agent versions)

At the time of writing, the compatibility matrix shows that Agent version 5.4.3  ...

Quest Rapid Recovery has a module for Powershell which allows manipulation of Rapid Recovery through several cmdlets. This comes in handy if you want to do some automation, and more importantly, it's a lot faster than the web interface.

To load the AppAssure module for PowerShell:

Import-Module appassurepowershellmodule

Then, to get a list of all available cmdlets for AppAssure, run:

Get-Command -Module appassurepowershellmodule

The majority of core and agent functions are available through PS. There are quite a few, and it would go beyond the scope of the article to explain them all. You can get (limited) help by prepending a cmdlet with the keyword help.

Suspend all backups for all m  ...