NovaBACKUP Spring Release: Manage More Clients, With Less Chaos

Managing backup for multiple clients has always required juggling a lot of moving parts. This spring release gives you more tools to do it cleanly. It upgrades the multi-tenant user management, adds role-based permissions, and the ability to push agent updates remotely from the central management, along with a substantial list of bug fixes and reliability improvements across the board.

Whether you’re an MSP managing dozens of client environments or an IT admin who needs tighter access control, this release is built with your workflow in mind.

Multi-Tenant Management

NovaBACKUP has always kept customer data separate. If you managed backup for multiple clients through an MSP account, each client’s backup data was already isolated: a client restoring their files only ever saw their own backup sets, never another client’s. What was missing was the ability to give those clients, or anyone else, their own login.

This release changes that. MSPs can now create separate accounts for each customer, so clients can log in and see only their own environment. Beyond clients, MSPs can also create accounts for team members, resellers, or agency partners, each with access scoped to exactly what they need. And admins can switch between accounts directly from the navigation menu, so they can manage each environment without logging in and out.

Key capabilities:

• Create individual accounts for customers, employees, resellers, or agency partners
• Each account holder logs in and sees only their own environment
• Users, groups, storage, and roles all scoped per tenant
• Sub-groups automatically inherit tenant membership from their parent group
• S3-compatible and cloud storage accounts can be scoped to a specific tenant
• Safety guardrails prevent accidentally deleting the default tenant or default role

Use cases

• You manage backup for 30 SMB clients. You can now give each client their own login so they can check backup status and browse restore points independently, without ever seeing another client’s data or environment.
• You work with reseller partners or sub-agents who manage a subset of your clients. Create accounts for them scoped to only their clients, so they can operate independently without touching the rest of your environment.
• You’re onboarding a new client and want to set up their environment cleanly. Create their account, assign storage, add their agents, and hand them a login, all without any risk of it overlapping with your existing client environments.

Role-Based Permissions

Multi-tenant account management and role-based permissions are two sides of the same coin. Once you can create separate accounts for clients, team members, resellers, and partners, the next question is: what should each of them actually be able to do? That’s where roles come in.

What’s new

You can now build fully custom roles with granular, per-category permissions and assign them to any account you create. Permissions are organized across every major area of the central management, giving you precise control over what each person can see and do.

Permission categories include:

• Agents and Groups: view, edit, or give full control over agents, groups, and associated devices
• Cloud Storage Accounts: view or edit cloud storage configurations
• Dashboard: view or edit the dashboard for authorized agents and groups
• Jobs: view job history and logs, edit, start, or stop backup jobs, and create restore jobs
• Notifications: view or edit triggers, notification history, and settings
• Reports: view or edit reports for authorized agents and groups
• Roles: view or edit roles — with the added safeguard that users can’t create or assign roles with more permissions than they themselves have

Additional improvements include:

• View Tenants and Edit Tenants permissions can be assigned per role, controlling who can see or modify tenant-level data
• MSP sub-user creation: MSP users can create sub-users with equal or lesser permissions, including a read-only Technical MSP role for support staff who need visibility without the ability to make changes

Use cases

• Your level 1 support technicians need to check backup job status and review logs, but shouldn’t be able to modify jobs or change storage settings. Assign them a role with view-only access to Jobs and Dashboard, and they get exactly the visibility they need, nothing more.
• You give a client their own login scoped to their tenant. You want them to be able to see their backup status and create restore jobs, but not edit backup jobs or touch storage configuration. Build a role with those exact permissions and assign it to their account.
• A reseller partner manages a subset of your clients. They need full control over their clients’ agents and jobs, but shouldn’t be able to see your other clients or modify your storage accounts. Scope their account to their tenant and assign a role with the appropriate permissions.

Push Remote Agent Updates

Keeping backup agents up to date across a large environment used to mean remoting into every single client environment individually to run the update. This release takes that off your plate.

What’s new

You can now push backup client updates directly to any connected agent from the agent details page in central management. No need to coordinate with end users, schedule maintenance windows manually, or touch each endpoint individually.

The update session history panel gives you full visibility into each update, including:

• Which processes ran
• Any messages logged during the update
• Files involved, with the ability to download logs for review

Use cases

• A new backup client version ships with a critical fix. Instead of coordinating with each client to schedule a maintenance window, you push the update to all affected agents from the central management during off-hours. Done before anyone starts their workday.

• An agent at a client site has been running an older version and you’re seeing inconsistent backup behavior. You push the update remotely, review the session log to confirm it completed cleanly, and close the ticket, all without dispatching a technician or asking the client to do anything.

• You’re rolling out an update across a large environment and want to verify each agent updated successfully before moving on. The update session history in the central management gives you a full audit trail per agent, so you can spot any failures and rerun as needed.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

This release includes an extensive list of fixes and improvements across both the management console and the backup client. The full changelog has everything, but here are a few fixes worth calling out specifically.

Reliability and data integrity

• Hyper-V and SQL in a single job on non-English OS: Combined Hyper-V and SQL backup jobs now work correctly on non-English operating systems.
• Restoring multiple VMs or SQL instances to alternate locations: NovaBACKUP now creates a separate folder per VM or SQL instance when restoring to an alternate location, preventing files from overwriting each other.
• Mount function now works with plugin backups: The Mount function previously failed whenever SQL, Hyper-V, or System State data was included in the same backup job as regular files. That’s now fixed.

Management console and usability

• Network device credential checks: Network devices now pass credential validation even when there’s already an open connection, eliminating false failures during credential checks.
• UI fixes: Several interface issues have been resolved, including missing field labels, scroll bar behavior, and fields that weren’t displaying correctly.
• Group management fixes: A series of group management bugs have been resolved, including agents disappearing when dragged to new groups, errors when deleting groups with sub-groups, and issues for users with sub-group-only access.
• Performance improvements: General performance improvements for retention and restores. The Run As tab in file backup job settings also loads significantly faster.

Frequently Asked Questions