Remote Backup

Claris now offers a new layer of protection with its Remote Backup feature! Remote Backups are the notion of storing backups redundantly in another location that is not the primary server itself. This redundancy offers an extra level of security if your server is the victim of a ransomware attack, hardware failure, or any other nightmare scenario you can imagine. This way, you can restore a backup stored in a secure location to your production environment.

This was something that you could manage yourself before, but Claris now offers it as a native part of their tech stack. We've put together a dedicated article covering everything you need to know about setting up Remote Backup. Give it a read when you're ready to get started!

Standby Server

The Standby Server is the other major feature update available in this new version. The Standby Server is a secondary FileMaker Server machine that can take over from the primary FileMaker Server at a moment's notice. This would be invaluable in the event of a critical failure on the primary machine, where the Standby server can step in without missing a beat. Similar to the Remote Backup feature, this redundancy provides maximum protection for your data and enables you to maintain your day-to-day operations with minimal downtime.

Please note, however, that the Standby Server must be a secondary machine that you configure manually; it is not automatically included with a FileMaker Server installation. Once you have the secondary machine with FileMaker Server installed, log in to the Admin Console to designate it as a Standby Server. Once configured, the Standby Server will periodically collect logs and backups, ensuring they are ready in the event of an outage.

Auto-Restarting of Services

This update is also paired with the nice feature of automatically restarting certain FileMaker Server services: Web Publishing Engine, Data API, and OData in the event of them terminating unexpectedly. In previous versions, if any of these services terminated, you could configure FileMaker Server to send you an error notification, but you would still need to manually restart the service or the server to restore the process. With this automatic service restart, server administrators will have the luxury of knowing that services will be restarted when encountering an error that is likely a fluke.

Export Field Contents on Server

The "Export Field Contents" script step can now be run server-side using the "Perform Script on Server" script step. Previously, if you wanted to export container data for use in a server-side process, you had to do so via a third-party plugin or through creative engineering to work around FileMaker Server's limitation. However, with this new update, you can now run this script step on the server, allowing you to deprecate some third-party plugins or simplify convoluted code!

Solution Upgrade Tool Updates

FileMaker 2026 introduces a new feature in the Solution Upgrade Tool that lets developers create new .fmp12 files from source XML. In conjunction with the Save as XML enhancements introduced in Claris FileMaker Pro 2026, this allows exporting, editing, and recreating XML as a Claris FileMaker Pro file. This change lays the foundation for 3rd-party tools to enable simple patches within the FileMaker space, as well as for AI-driven solutions to create simple FileMaker files with appropriate prompting. There is definitely a lot of potential in this enhancement, and we eagerly await the creative solutions and products the FileMaker community comes up with!

Conclusion

FileMaker Server 2026 is packed with features that make a real difference, and we're excited to see how the community uses them. Whether you're eyeing the Standby Server, Remote Backup, or any of the other improvements in this release, there's plenty to explore. Feel free to reach out to DB Services with any questions. We'd love to help you get the most out of this update!