A solid backup solution, free for personal use
March 19, 2021
A solid backup solution, free for personal use
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Community Edition
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication
First, I'd like to mention that I'm reviewing the Community edition which I personally use at home. We are using the enterprise edition at work.
I use Veeam community edition at home to protect my small infrastructure consisting of a few servers and VMs. I needed a solution that would allow me to backup all 'mission-critical' VMs / OSes and data locally and replicate the backups to a physically distant server (on-site) for disaster recovery (ok, I am bit paranoid about losing data). Since my ISP is limited, I couldn't leverage the cloud to replicate.
I use Veeam community edition at home to protect my small infrastructure consisting of a few servers and VMs. I needed a solution that would allow me to backup all 'mission-critical' VMs / OSes and data locally and replicate the backups to a physically distant server (on-site) for disaster recovery (ok, I am bit paranoid about losing data). Since my ISP is limited, I couldn't leverage the cloud to replicate.
- Virtualized workloads
- Endpoints and physical servers running Windows & Linux
- In addition to back up, we also replicate some of these workloads
- Cloud-hosted VMs within AWS or Azure
- Capacity Tier to store data within object storage for longer term retention
- Capacity Tier to store data within object storage for longer term retention
- Backup VMs with flexible data retention schedules
- Replicate backups accross local repository (Windows -> FreeNAS)
- Usefull notifications in case of warnings / errors. Allows 'Fire and Forget'
- Easy to browse and restore available backups
- Updates are not easy to locate and download, would be nice to be able to download updates from within Veeam itself.
- In my case, I have a cryptic error message when trying to restore from replicated repository (but the data is there).
- UI takes a bit of time to get used. Easy to use when you understand the logic behind it.
I use Veeam to protect 1 Windows Server (AD DC) running 6 VMs (Windows / Linux) along with a partial backup of the server data (documents, pictures, videos). The local backup is replicated to a distant computer (FreeNAS) situated in another building on my property.
I initially installed Veeam CE only to evaluate the product for use at work. After using, I really enjoyed the simplicity and flexibility and did a full deployment at home for my personal backups.
I initially installed Veeam CE only to evaluate the product for use at work. After using, I really enjoyed the simplicity and flexibility and did a full deployment at home for my personal backups.
- CE edition is free!
- Peace of mind having a solid backup solution in place for my own data
- 'Fire and Forget' system that will send notifications in case of warnings / error
I try to be as paperless as I can at home: much easier to organise and find documents on a computer than in a file cabinet! The drawback is that a lot of important stuff ends up being 'virtual' : family pictures/videos, tax documents etc. This forced me to find a solution to properly protect all this data. The amount of data coupled with a rural ISP meant that a local solution had to be used. I tinkered with Windows Backup in the past but never felt confident that I was properly protected.
Having found and deployed Veeam, I now have peace of mind about lowering the risk of losing all my important data. The solution is a lot more robust that anything I tried, easy to manage and low-cost (as in free!)
Having found and deployed Veeam, I now have peace of mind about lowering the risk of losing all my important data. The solution is a lot more robust that anything I tried, easy to manage and low-cost (as in free!)
I am not currently using the cloud as my ISP is not fast enough (rural)
I currently replicate my backups to a FreeNAS server that is located in another building. I'm in the process of learning/evaluating FreeNAS and eventually hoping to replace my Windows Server with an Open-Source OS / Virtualization