Veeam, most well known virtual machine backup software, announced back in October that they were working on a new product: Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE. Veeam Endpoint Backup is designed for physical computers running Windows 7 or higher as well as Windows Server 2008 or higher. Yesterday, the company held a webinar to discuss the product and started inviting individuals to try the beta product which is expected to reach general availability in early 2015.
VEB allows backing up your computer to an internal or external drive, a NAS, or a Veeam Backup Repository. The backups are saved in the same file format as Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam uses full and incremental backups to optimize the process. Veeam Endpoint Backup also provides a control panel to configure your backups, such as at a scheduled time or at logon/logoff. Along with configuring backups in the VEB control panel, you can also view statistics and reports on how the backups have been going and related details about them.
Your backups can be made as volume backups or folder & file backups or a hybrid mix of both. Your restore options are then limited to the type of backups you made, e.g. you cannot directly restore a single file from a volume backup. VEB provides multiple restore options with volume-level restores, file-level restores, and utilities like bootable recovery media with drivers to do a bare metal recovery or through the Windows Recovery Environment.
The free software utility uses Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express for a local database to track backup information. Along with that service, Veeam Endpoint Service and Veeam Endpoint SystemTray Service will also run on the target computer to orchestrate the backup processes.
You can sign up to access the Beta version of the software at go.veeam.com/endpoint. Once you receive an email with the beta download location and password, you will be able to download the 200+ MB installer and the 90 page PDF documentation. The documentation for this Beta and free product might be the best documentation I’ve read in a while and if it is getting this much attention, it seems a good sign of the final product.