What's New in MaxBack 4.x

MaxBack 4.x adds built-in monitoring and notifications, a redesigned command line, and moves to a modern .NET foundation. Here's what's new.

Built-in Monitoring and Notifications

In earlier versions, checking whether backups ran successfully meant looking at logs or setting up external monitoring. A failed nightly backup, a stopped service, or an expiring license could easily go unnoticed for a while.

MaxBack 4.x changes that. A new watchdog service runs alongside your VssWriter instances and watches everything that matters:

• Backup results — get notified when a backup or restore fails, completes with warnings, or succeeds
• Missed backups — define backup schedules with cron expressions and get alerted when a backup window closes without a successful backup
• Service health — stopped VssWriter services are detected and restarted automatically, with alerts if recovery fails
• License status — warnings before a license expires, alerts when it does
• Disk space — alerts when free space on log backup drives drops below safe thresholds

Notifications are delivered through email (SMTP) or webhooks. You can set up multiple channels, each subscribed to different events — critical failures to your ops team by email, everything to your monitoring dashboard by webhook.

SMTP supports both Basic authentication and OAuth2 client credentials (for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and similar providers). Credentials are encrypted and stored locally.

The webhook payload is a documented JSON format with full session logs for backup events and structured details for alerts — ready for integration with any monitoring or automation platform.

For setup instructions and the webhook payload reference, see the Watchdog documentation.

A Modern, Interactive Command Line

The command-line client has been completely redesigned. Instead of requiring all flags and values upfront, it guides you through each step interactively — showing available databases, log media, and configuration options to pick from.

Key improvements:

• Guided setup — run a command without flags and MaxBack walks you through it
• Full configuration management — view, change, and reset every setting from the command line (3.x required manual XML editing for individual changes)
• Clear command structure — commands are grouped logically: db connect, license install, options list, watchdog channels add
• Batch mode — add --batch to any command for scripting and automation

See the CLI reference for all commands.

Under the Hood

Beyond the new features, MaxBack 4.x is a ground-up rewrite on a modern foundation. Here's what changed technically.

Modern .NET

MaxBack 4.x moves from the legacy .NET Framework to the current .NET platform. This brings better performance, long-term support, and a cleaner deployment story.

All required runtimes — including the Visual C++ Redistributable and .NET Desktop Runtime — are bundled in the installer and set up automatically. No separate downloads, no version conflicts, no prerequisite checks. Install MaxBack and you're ready to go.

Transparent Configuration

Configuration is now a 3-layer model: defaults, config set (curated overrides for your backup solution like Veeam or Azure Backup), and custom (your own overrides). Each layer only stores what it changes — run options list and you see exactly which layer each setting comes from.

This replaces the 3.x model where config sets silently replaced your entire configuration file. Configuration is stored as JSON and managed through the CLI. See the configuration docs for details.

Enhanced Backup and Restore Handling

New configuration options give you finer control over backup behavior — including separate autorecovery settings for copy backups, automatic Azure Backup copy mode validation, and configurable component mode handling. See the configuration docs for details.

Upgrading from 3.x

After installing MaxBack 4.x, run the upgrade command for each database instance:

maxback.vssclient options upgrade -d MYDB

The tool detects your existing XML configuration, identifies the matching config set, and migrates only the values that differ from defaults. See the upgrade section for details.

Getting Started

• Getting Started guide — Installation, licensing, and connecting your first database
• Watchdog & Notifications — Set up monitoring, email alerts, and webhook integrations
• Configuration — The configuration model and backup solution setup
• CLI Reference — Full command reference