Fantastic and reliable rock-solid backup solution for your organisation

Veeam Backup & Replication is in use at the 3 schools I support to backup the Hyper-V servers on a rolling basis. The ability to specify multiple backup targets, both local rotating USB hard drives and to a network attached storage device (NAS) gives us a sense of trust and reliability in the backup process. Having daily emails notifying of backup success/failure keeps me on top of everything even when i'm not on-site. I have had to use the recovery process several times after a failed Windows Update (print nightmare anyone?) or when there is an accidentally deleted employee/student files. The recovery process is very pain free and easy to use whether you are recoving a single file or an entire Virtual Machine. I have no bad things to say about the product, it's rock solid and the community edition is a free offering. If I was in a large enterprise with many servers, I would rollout the same backup solution without a second thought.

I have backed up a few VMs on 2-3 servers at each of the locations I manage. This is as anticipated as it covers all of the virtual machines I run, being a gradeschool environment there isn't a huge dataset and it effectively covers everything.

Being frustrated with the limitations on the offering that Microsoft provides within Windows is an understatement, I knew I had to find a solid reliable third party product to handle the task and found many recommendations from other system admins for Veeam Community Edition. I tested it out on my smallest site and after running it for a few months was happy with the capabilities and didn't hesitate to roll it out to the others in place of Windows offerings.

Right now I haven't used the cloud platform backup products, I expect them to be just as solid as the local replication.

I backup the virtual machines to a NAS dedicated to the purpose. Veeam allows you to enter the desired username/password to access the shares without having to store them in the often compromised Windows Credential cache. This way I have created a user with read-only access to access the backups from explorer/other apps but given Veeam separate credentials with read-write permissions. This helps reduce the chance of attackers being able to destroy our NAS backups if they compromise one of the servers.