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Veeam Endpoint Backup is a free data protection and disaster recovery solution for physical machines. After the announce of Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, in October 2014, there were some beta (initially private, then public) about this new product.

Now has been announced the general availability of the product so you can start using it on your clients (and maybe also on some physical servers).

I’ve tested one of the beta versions and the final version will be almost similar, just with a better GUI, more clear and helpful. The interface is really simple and easy also because it designed for an user, so less options to touch and modify become much better.

One nice aspect, that was present also in the beta, is the contextual help: if you press F1 key then a browser will be opened on the right page on the Veeam Help Center. Useful, but from point of view also a “?” icon can help of could be more user friendly.

Compared to the beta, the only limit of this version if the possibility save Veeam Endpoint Backup to a Veeam repository. The limit is not in the product itself, but just in the availability of the Veeam Backup & Replication v8 Patch #2 that is expect at the end of April (also with vSphere 6.0 compatibility). The option is available in Veeam Endpoint and will become useful when the path will become GA.

VeeamEndpoint-Repo

Installation and requirements will be the same as in the beta releases as described in this post. If you are upgrading from a beta version read carefully the documentation to understand if you can keep your previous backup or if is better start from scratch.

Also the backup configuration will remain similar to what you have seen in the beta, with some minor enhancements like a better support for backup disks rotation, or the event driven backup, useful for start it when you attach your USB disk or you PC can reach a NAS target.

VeeamEndpoint-Events

Has become more clear also which backup mode will be the recommended one: from this this the backup more are ordered from the faster to the slowest. So unless you don’t have just few file to save, use the Entire Computer mode.

VeeamEndpoint-Source

The restore points management is managed in a similar way of Veeam Backup & Replication: it count only the successful backup operations. So if you have not done regular backups in the last 5 days, those will not count in the retention policy.

VeeamEndpoint-Retention

The data are stored using a forever incremental retention model (the same used in Veeam Backup and Replication) with one full backup (.vbk file) and several incremental files (.vib). There are also backup metadata file (.vbm), updated with every backup job session, that contains information about the computer on which the backup was created, every restore point in the backup chain and how restore points are linked together, and so on (the metadata file is required for performing file-level or volume-level restore).

Like in Veeam Backup & Replication there is also a manual full backup called “Standalone full backup”. Please note that on this type of backup the retention policy is not applied! You have to manually delete it, when you do not longer need it.

Veeam Endpoint Backup is also simple and easy in the architecture aspects: has one-service architecture. When you install the product, the following components are deployed on the computer:

  • Veeam Endpoint Service is a Microsoft Windows service responsible for performing all kind of backup and restore tasks on the computer. The service is started automatically when you power on your computer, and runs continuously in the background.
  • Veeam Endpoint SystemTray Service is a Veeam Backup Endpoint tray agent that communicates with the Veeam Endpoint Service to let you monitor the backup status and provide you with quick access to main Veeam Endpoint functions such as performing backup and restore operations, viewing statistics on created backups and so on.
  • To store its configuration data, Veeam Endpoint Backup uses the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB Edition.

Veeam-Endpoint-ServicesOf course there are some limits, considering that this is a version 1.0 of the product, and also that it’s a free product!

You cannot script your backup jobs, there isn’t a PowerShell integration, email notification, support of pre-job or post-jobs scripts and so on… And of course there isn’t a central management (but I suppose that this feature, if and when will be available will become a full product, like comparing Veeam ZIP with Veeam Backup & Replication).

About the post scripts limit (and could be applied also on the notification part, considering that could be simple e post-script), there could be a work-around: you can trigger a script after a specific Windows event, considering that Veeam Endpoint Backup will generate those application event entries:

  • Event-ID 150 on successful backup jobs
  • Event-ID 190 when a job stops with errors
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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.